


Laissez-Faire

by suspiciousflashlight



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Getting Lost, M/M, art museum misconduct, bike chase, escaped reptile, french riviera vacation, getting lost: 2, google maps betrayal, inadequate french, inclement weather, totally platonic buddy backpacking trip, vague timeskip spoilers maybe???, you know just your average trip to france
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 08:01:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27589904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suspiciousflashlight/pseuds/suspiciousflashlight
Summary: This isnotan international booty call, no matter what Ryuu says. This is a buddy backpacking trip along the French Riviera,totallyplatonic, and because this also happens to be Asahi's first time traveling outside of Japan, Nishinoya has already decided that (no pressure) this trip must be absolutely one-hundred-percent-plus-shipping-and-handling perfect. Asahi is going to have the time of his life, whether he wants to or not.(But hey, if the natural romantic magnetism of the Rivierajust so happensto prompt Asahi to fall madly in love with him? And if Nishinoyajust so happensto do everything in his power to nudge that process along a little bit? Well...)
Relationships: Azumane Asahi/Nishinoya Yuu
Comments: 55
Kudos: 162
Collections: HQ Feels (Mostly M or E)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> now blessed with [beautiful art by interstellarhitchiker](https://interstellarhitchhiker.tumblr.com/post/636414913983676416/theyre-stupid-your-honor-asanoya-bike-chase) (slight spoilers for the final chapter I guess???)
> 
> thank you sally for your thorough and hilarious feedback on this!!

NICE, FRANCE, 2015

VOL RETARDÉ flashes across the arrivals screen at the Nice Cȏte d’Azur Airport, and Noya fidgets, drumming his fingers on his knee, jiggling his foot against the ground until the whole row of pleather seats in the waiting area is vibrating and people nearby start giving him dirty looks. The screen takes another minute to update; the revised time is half an hour from now. Okay. That’s fine. Half an hour is fine. He can totally wait half an hour. No problem! These days, he’s a _champion_ at airport-waiting, an absolute _all-star_. Like that time in Munich, when there was that huge-ass thunderstorm and his connection got delayed for hours and hours and hours? No problem at all! He just slept the whole time!

Noya could totally nap for half an hour right now. He totally could. It’s already past midnight, and he was out in the sun hiking along the coast all afternoon—napping should be easy. Over the past few months he’s developed the uncanny ability to nap any time, any place. The permanent jetlag definitely helps, as does the frequent knowledge that if he doesn’t nap _right now_ , he may not get a chance to sleep for the next twenty-four hours. But right at this particular moment he feels wide awake.

Noya had this plan, see. He had it all figured out. Asahi’s flight was _supposed_ to get in just after nine, so Noya would meet him at the airport, and then they would take the bus downtown, and Noya would take him out for dinner at a nice restaurant somewhere in Jean-Médecin, and it would be dark and there would be romantic candles and cheap wine and delicious French food, and Asahi would chill out, have a good time, not regret booking a flight halfway across the world, maybe even think _whoa, Noya’s gotten so good-looking since I last saw him, hey, you know what, the French Riviera is actually an amazing place to finally fall madly in love with him._

(Okay, that last part is optional, obviously. Noya just wants Asahi to have a good time. But Noya, long-term torchbearer of the Secret Crush Olympics, certainly won’t complain if something along those lines _does_ end up happening. And if he does his best to engineer the circumstances a little—to set things up so as to encourage Asahi along that line of thinking— _well_. No one can fault a guy for trying, right?)

But then Asahi had messaged to say his connection from Paris was delayed two-and-a-half hours, so Noya had scrapped that plan and showed up at the airport at eleven-thirty, only to find the flight delayed another twenty minutes, and now another half hour. He’s been frantically searching up restaurants on his phone via the shitty airport Wi-Fi, watching his options dwindle as the minutes tick by. There’s, like, _one_ pizza place on rue Masséna that _might_ be still be open, _maybe,_ if they really book it downtown. Otherwise, there’s… McDonald’s. Hmm. Not _exactly_ what he had in mind. But it’s fine. It’ll be just fine.

Ryuu picks up on the sixth ring, right before his LINE prompts Noya to leave a message. Sounding groggy and disoriented, he mutters, “Noya? Dude? You good?”

“I’m good, I’m good,” Noya assures him. He fidgets with a strip of pleather peeling away from the cushion of his seat, exposing nasty-looking yellow foam underneath. “So. How’s it going?”

“Dude, it’s _seven in the morning_ ,” Ryuu groans. “Can we do this later?”

“Seven isn’t even that early,” Noya says dismissively. “Ryuu, his flight’s late. I need a pep talk.”

“ _Again?_ Geez… okay, hold on.” There’s some muttering in the background, followed by Ryuu saying, “No, it’s just Noya… go back to sleep…” Half the time Noya still can’t believe Ryuu and Kiyoko are actually together, like _together_ -together, like engaged and saving to buy a house and the whole deal. It’s crazy. It gives him hope.

“Okay,” says Ryuu a moment later, sounding slightly more awake and none too happy about it. “So you have to wait another hour for your international booty call, that’s—”

“This isn’t a _booty call_ ,” Noya protests, outraged. “ _First of all_ , it’s a buddy backpacking trip, totally platonic, and _second of all_ , I feel only the purest of pure _true love_. It is _not_ a booty call—”

“Right, the purest of pure true love, except you totally wanna bang him in some grotty hostel bunk bed— _totally_ platonically, though—”

“Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive!” Noya protests. “ _Anyway_ , I got us an AirBnB for Nice. It was the same price and this way we’re not stuck with a bunch of gross dudes.”

“Gross dudes such as yourself,” says Ryuu.

“Exactly,” says Noya. “Hostels just amplify the grossness. I don’t need that right now.”

“Okay, so you’re at an AirBnB. Just pull the old oh-there’s-only-one-bed trick,” Ryuu suggests. “Y’know, like, _oops, guess we’ll have to share!_ ”

“I dunno, I don’t want to come on too strong,” Noya says doubtfully, pretending he hasn’t thought through this _exact_ fantasy approximately one million times in the four months since Asahi booked his flight. “It’s Asahi. He’s skittish. I gotta take it slow. Just sort of put out the vibe.”

“You’ve been ‘putting out the vibe’ for _four years_ , man. Enough is enough! Look, I don’t know how many times I can say it, but you’ve _got_ this,” says Ryuu. He has to pause to stifle a yawn before he continues. “You’re in France! That’s, like, the most romantic country in the world, right? You couldn’t mess this up if you tried!”

“Yeah… yeah! You’re right! I got this!”

“Hell yeah, man! You _totally_ got this!”

“Yeah, I _got_ this!”

“Yeah, man, yeah! You—what? Oh—right—sorry, I’ll keep it down. Sorry, Kiyoko told me to shut up,” Ryuu informs Noya sheepishly.

“Tell her _my bad_ from me,” says Noya. “Okay, go back to bed. Thanks.”

“You’re feeling pepped?”

“I’m feeling pepped, yeah. I got this,” Noya repeats happily. And, in the moment, he actually feels like he does.

Asahi’s flight finally gets in around twelve-thirty, and Noya joins the crowd of French people hovering around the arrivals terminal—craning his neck to look for Asahi’s unmistakable man-bun, wishing as usual that he were taller, and trying not to look too much like an overexcited toddler hyped up on way too much candy, which is sort of how he feels. 

Obviously he’s pumped because, well, _Asahi_ , but also it occurs to him now that he hasn’t actually seen anyone he knows in almost a year. He’s been moving around from place to place, working for a month here, hiking for a week there, making friends, sure, having the time of his life, yeah, but—sometimes he gets homesick, too. He almost cried when he ran into a group of Japanese women in a London hostel, even though they were all a decade older than him and spent all their time talking about their boring old mortgages. He’ll have to try not to cry now, though, because that might freak Asahi out, and Noya has already decided that this is going to be the Best Trip Ever. Asahi hasn’t travelled outside Japan on his own before, so no pressure, but everything about this trip has to be absolutely one-hundred-percent-plus-shipping-and-handling _perfect._

Finally Noya spots Asahi towering apologetically over the crowd of passengers around him, his hair working its way out of the loose bun at the base of his neck, a little overdressed for the warm Cȏte d’Azur weather, a duffle bag slung over one shoulder, and—glasses. He’s wearing glasses. What the—when did he get glasses? _Glasses?_ Holy shit, he looks so hot in glasses. Noya’s brain is in the process of auto-generating approximately a trillion sexy librarian fantasies—

But the sexy librarian fantasies can wait. “ _Asahi!_ ” Noya shouts, and waves both his arms frantically to get Asahi’s attention. When Asahi just looks around in confusion, Noya rolls his eyes, cursing his height (well, his lack thereof), and shoves through the crowd.

He slams into Asahi at speed (Asahi lets out a belaboured _oof_ that suggests all the air just got smacked right out of his lungs, but oh well) and wraps his arms around him, squeezing tight. Asahi smells like airplane, stale and sterile, but underneath that he smells like Japan—or at least like laundry detergent, the same laundry detergent Noya remembers from high school, which right now is close enough.

“Oh!” Asahi says, and pats Noya awkwardly on the back. “Um! Hi!”

“Dude, you’re _here_ ,” says Noya, pulling back enough to grin up at him.

“Ah, yeah, sorry, they didn’t have our plane ready in Paris. Sorry,” Asahi repeats, fully prepared to claim personal responsibility for the failures of his airline.

“Hey, it’s all good, you’re here now! Is that all your stuff?”

Asahi adjusts the duffel bag over his shoulder. He already looks worried. “Um, yes, is that—you told me to pack light, so—”

“Yeah—yeah! No, that’s good, that’s good!” Noya reassures him. “C’mon, let’s get you a bus card! You hungry? Most places are closed now, but—”

“Ah, no, I’m alright. Suga packed me lunch—uh—dinner?” Asahi squints in jetlagged confusion. “Food, anyway. I’m fine.”

“Ha! He Mom-ed you!”

“He Mom-ed me,” Asahi confirms, grinning.

“But wait, isn’t Suga-san—”

“Still in Miyagi? Yep,” says Asahi. “He came all the way down to Tokyo just so he could fuss in person. Um, and so he could borrow my waffle iron. I think that was actually the main reason.” His smile fades as they step out of the airport and approach the bus terminal, where a disgruntled transit employee is half-dozing behind the desk. “Oh, I didn’t realize—um—I looked up some French, but I don’t really—”

“I’ll get it for you!” Noya says quickly. “Don’t worry, my French sucks ass—it doesn’t even matter. Most people speak some English. I mean, my English also sucks ass, but it sucks _less_ ass.”

In high school, Noya remembers asking Ennoshita once when he thought Asahi would grow out of being so nervous all the time, and he remembers how Ennoshita had hesitated and then said he thought maybe Asahi _wouldn’t_ grow out of it, maybe that was just the way he was. That is, of course, totally ridiculous, because Asahi is really cool and definitely doesn’t need to be stressed out all the time—he’s _so cool!_ —but if that’s how it is, Noya doesn’t mind at all. But this is why it’s so important that this becomes the Best Trip Ever. He spent _weeks_ convincing Asahi to come traveling with him, and he knows the flights weren’t cheap, and he also knows he and Asahi haven’t seen each other in person since before Noya left Japan, and privately he’s kind of concerned that Asahi will be stressed out and miserable the whole time and it’ll be all Noya’s fault.

(“Dude, you’re turning into Asahi yourself,” Ryuu had accused, when Noya had called him in a panic after Asahi booked the trip.)

But for right now, things seem okay. At this time of night the bus is practically empty, so Noya and Asahi are able to grab seats together, and the way Asahi is sitting makes his thigh brush against Noya’s every time either one of them shifts, which gives him an adrenaline rush comparable to the time he went skydiving in Switzerland.

“So the glasses, huh?” says Noya. “That’s new.”

Asahi touches the frames self-consciously. “Oh—yeah. Daichi says they make me look like a grandpa…”

“Pff. What would Daichi-san know? He’s grandpa central. That one sweater he wears, with the ugly stripes? I mean, what is that? Uh—don’t tell him I said that. He’ll fly out here and kick my butt,” Noya adds quickly, and Asahi laughs. “Anyway, I think they’re cool, the glasses. They look good on you!”

“Oh, thanks,” says Asahi.

Is Asahi blushing? Holy crap, is he blushing? Wait, no, it’s just the weird fluorescent lighting on the bus reflecting off his bag. Or is it? Gah, Noya can’t tell. He gives up and moves on. “Hey, let me try them on!”

“Um, okay…” Asahi hands him the glasses, which Noya promptly jams on his face. They’re too big, already sliding down his nose; the lenses make him dizzy, setting the interior of the bus into ultra-ultra-sharp focus, which, frankly, is not the best way to view the interior of any form of public transportation, ever. He really did _not_ need an HD look at the wad of greyish, aging gum stuck to the back of the seat in front of him, for instance. Yuck.

Asahi claps his hand over his mouth to muffle a snort of laughter. “You look like a nerd,” he says, and snaps a picture with his phone before Noya has a chance to protest.

“Delete it! Delete it right now!” Noya demands, and tries to wrestle the phone out of Asahi’s hands, but Asahi holds it out of Noya’s reach with his stupid long arms, and then an old lady glares at them as they shove each other, which makes Asahi quiet down right away and duck his head apologetically.

After that Asahi doesn’t say much, so Noya takes it upon himself fill the silence, telling Asahi about the time he dropped his phone in a lake near Salzburg—the time he took some weird herbal headache medicine from a Brazilian dude in Cologne that got him super stoned—the time he locked himself out on the balcony of his sublet in Florence in nothing but a towel—the time he nearly fell off a cliff hiking along the coast of Brittany (Asahi goes appropriately pale at this point and mutters, “Oh my God, you could have _died_ …”). Noya talks and privately he tells himself that Asahi’s just quiet because he’s tired. Yeah, that’s definitely it. Definitely. Asahi isn’t freaking out, or miserably homesick, or regretting flying halfway across the world to hang out with his underclassman from high school. No way, definitely not. _Definitely_ not.

Noya checked into their AirBnB when he arrived from Toulouse that afternoon, so when they get to the apartment block he shows Asahi how to unlock the gate to the scraggly little courtyard, advises him against using the quaint but deeply untrustworthy old birdcage elevator in the lobby, tells him not to turn the hot water tap in the bathroom all the way on because the water that comes out is the approximate temperature of microwaved lava. Asahi looks basically dead at this point, so Noya tells him, “Go to bed before you pass out and squash me,” and that’s that for the night. No romantic candles, no wine, no walking around Jean-Médecin or going down to the beach—just Asahi alone in the bedroom, presumably out cold, and Noya alone on the pullout couch, telling himself that everything is going to work out just fine. Everyone says the Cȏte d’Azur is a great place to vacation—good food, nice beaches, perfect weather, not too busy at this time of year. Asahi will totally like it. And if he doesn’t like Nice there’s Monaco, and if he doesn’t like Monaco there’s Èze, and if he doesn’t like Èze there’s Cannes, and if he doesn’t like Cannes there’s Saint-Tropez. Noya has backup plan upon backup plan and two whole weeks. He’ll be _just fine_.

MIYAGI, JAPAN, 2011

“Did you see when those two big guys tried to block Asahi-san in the practice game yesterday, and he just _smashed_ that spike right through them? I mean, wow! Wasn’t that _cool?_ ”

This is back in first-year, when Noya is not quite sixteen, walking home with Ryuu after practice. Both of them are still wearing their sweaty practice clothes; summer is clinging on tight in Miyagi, a million degrees too hot to even _think_ about putting on their tracksuits after practice. Noya has been fantasizing vividly about popsicles for the last two hours.

“Yeah, it was cool! That’s gonna be me one day, just wait!” Ryuu insists. Then he grins at Noya and gives him a friendly shove. “You sure like Asahi-san a lot, huh, Noya?”

“Yeah!” says Noya. _Duh_. Asahi is easily the coolest person on the team. _Easily_. He’s already huge and still growing—it seems like he gets taller every week—and his hair is long enough to put in a ponytail, which makes him look really hardcore, like a gangster or something. And holy crap, he’s so good! Sugawara puts the ball up for him and he just _destroys_ it! Once during practice Asahi hit a spike wide by accident, so wide it smashed Noya in the back of the head where he was standing on the sidelines getting told off by the captain, and Noya just went _flying_. It felt like getting gently shot by a bazooka. So cool!

“So d’you have a _crush_ on him or something?” Ryuu teases.

Noya shoves Ryuu back hard enough to send him staggering over sideways. “Pff! Yeah right! My heart belongs to Kiyoko-san, duh!”

This is in the days before Noya and Ryuu come to a romantic truce on the basis of the realization that hell will freeze over before Kiyoko stoops low enough to give either of them a second glance, so Ryuu scowls and pushes him again, and Noya hits him in the stomach, and they spend the rest of the walk bickering and wrestling, and that seems to be the end of it.

But Noya goes home that night with Ryuu’s question echoing in his head. Which is stupid. _Obviously_ he doesn’t have a _crush_ on _Asahi_. That’s _stupid_. He likes girls! He’s head-over-heels for Kiyoko! Some guys are just really cool too, like Asahi, or like the upper-year captain of Noya’s middle school team, but he admires them in a pure and straightforward man-to-man kind of way. And maybe he tries to show off in practice so Asahi will pay attention to him, and maybe he sometimes thinks about what it would feel like if Asahi hugged him or if he got to touch Asahi’s nice hair, but that’s normal! Sugawara was completely obsessed with touching Ryuu’s hair after he buzzed it. Completely normal! Right? Right. He doesn’t want to _kiss_ Asahi or anything like that.

What would it be like to kiss Asahi, anyway? Scratchy, Noya thinks, since he’s all scruffy. But that might be kinda nice. And Asahi would probably, no, _definitely_ , be really shy. He’d turn all red, all the way down his neck, like he does whenever one of the third-years compliments his spiking. And he’d have to bend way, way down if he wanted to kiss Noya. Or maybe Noya could, like, stand on a box or something. Yeah, that could work. And then Asahi would lean in, and Noya could reach out and run his fingers through Asahi’s nice hair, and maybe Asahi would put his hand on Noya’s back, and then…

Noya’s stomach gives a funny lurch and he thinks, suddenly lightheaded, _oh my God, what_. He leaps up from his desk where he’d been studying—well, where he’d been staring blankly at his notes and doodling little stick-birds in the margins—and shouts, “Jiji, I’m going for a run!”

“Eh?” his grandpa calls back. “But it’s already ten—hey! Did you finish your homework? Get back here—”

“Won’t be long!” Noya yells, already sprinting for the door.

Ryuu only lives a couple of blocks from him, and Noya can run pretty fast when he wants to, like for instance when he’s fueled by the buzzing panic of an unintentional moment of self-discovery, so within fifteen minutes he’s on Ryuu’s front step, gasping for breath and hammering on the door.

Saeko answers. She stares at him in bemusement and says, “Shit, Yuu, where’s the fire, huh? You know it’s, like, ten, right?”

“Neesan! I need to talk to Ryuu!” Noya pants. “It’s really urgent!”

“Yeah, no shit,” says Saeko. “Okay, one sec. RYUU! HEY, RYUU! RYUUNOSUKE, GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE, IT’S YUU!”

“OKAY, OKAY, I’M COMING!” Ryuu yells back, somewhere inside. There’s a splash, and a thud, and a muffled _owwww_.

“Wanna come in?” Saeko asks Noya. When he shakes his head, she shrugs and says, “Alright, well, holler if you need anything,” then disappears back into the house.

Noya can hear someone thundering down the stairs, and then a moment later Ryuu charges into the hall, naked except for the towel clutched haphazardly around his waist as he drips water on the floor. “What? What? What is it?” he demands. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“I have a crush on Asahi!” says Noya.

Ryuu laughs. When Noya does not, the grin slides right off Ryuu’s face and he says, “Whoa, wait, are you serious?”

“Yeah, man! Like a full-on crush!”

“A crush,” says Ryuu. “A crush… holy shit… you have a crush on… ? For real? You—but he’s—but you’re—oh my God, I shouldn’t have teased you about it, I’m so sorry, holy shit, dude, that was totally uncool—”

“Calm down!” Noya hisses, very aware of Saeko lurking somewhere inside, probably doing her very best to eavesdrop. “Why are _you_ freaking out? I’m the one who should be freaking out!”

“ _Are_ you freaking out?” asks Ryuu.

Noya opens his mouth to say _yeah, DUH,_ but he hesitates. Upon reflection, he’s somewhat surprised to find that no, actually, he isn’t freaking out. The fifteen-minute sprint has given him a chance to cool down and come to terms with the whole bisexuality thing. He’s all good now. Plus, statistically speaking, he’s just doubled his prospective dating pool. That’s pretty sweet.

(“Two times zero is still zero,” Noya can hear Ennoshita pointing out, calmly delivering brutal and factual burns in that no-bullshit Ennoshita way.)

“Not really,” says Noya. “I mean, I was a minute ago, but yeah, think I’m good now.”

Ryuu stares at Noya for a moment, then claps a hand to his forehead and wails, “Man, Noya, how are you so _cool?_ ”

NICE, FRANCE, 2015

On their first morning in Nice, Noya wakes up at six-thirty, throws the shutters open, makes tea, checks the time, eats a piece of toast, checks the time again, scrolls through his phone for a couple minutes, eats another piece of toast, and checks the time again, in case maybe eating that second piece of toast somehow took up a whole half-hour.

Nishinoya Yuu is not, by nature, a patient person. Personally, he thinks it’s pretty impressive that he makes it all the way till seven (well— _almost_ seven, _basically_ seven) before he barges into the bedroom and hurls himself across Asahi’s sleeping figure, shouting, “RISE AND SHINE, ASAHI!”

Asahi snaps upright with a yelp, his hair frizzed and his eyes wide with the particular brand of panic that accompanies being violently awoken in a strange bed after less than six hours of sleep. He stares around the room, clearly disoriented, until his gaze settles on Noya and things seem to click, at which point he sags back down into his pillow with a groan and mumbles, “What time is it?”

“Seven-thirty!” says Noya, which is _not_ a lie, just some generous rounding (unrelatedly, his high school math grades were about on par with his social studies). He slides off Asahi and sprawls beside him on the bed, and his heart starts pounding as he thinks _whoa, I’m lying in bed with Asahi._ Okay, Noya’s fully dressed and on top of the sheets, and Asahi has a certain freshly-exhumed-corpse aura to him, but still.

(In high school Noya had the wildly exciting experience of getting to sleep beside Asahi a couple of times at training camp. Each time, Noya lay on his futon staring up at the ceiling and thinking _Asahi is sleeping literally two feet away from me, oh my God, this is amazing, I’m never gonna be able to sleep in a million years, but damn, I really wish Narita would quit snoring so loud;_ each time, Noya had been so tired from camp that he’d been out cold within five minutes of lights out. Sixteen-year-old Noya would be losing his mind right now.)

“Too early,” Asahi complains. He pulls the sheet up over his face and adds, “Don’t look at me, I’m gross. I need to shower.”

“I’ve seen you grosser,” Noya points out, and kicks Asahi in the shins. “Come on, get up, get up! You’re wasting the day!”

While Asahi’s in the shower, Noya’s phone buzzes, and he picks it up to see a message from—Daichi? Huh. Daichi never texts him. He hasn’t talked to Daichi in, like, six months.

 **Daichi:** Hey, did Asahi make it in okay? Not to helicopter but his parents keep texting me. Also Suga is fretting.

 **Daichi:** hi noya this is suga!! don’t believe a word out of daichi’s dirty lying whore mouth!!! he’s the one fretting!!!! whereas I am very relaxed and chill as you know!!!!!

 **Noya:** nope guess hes lost in france somewhere oh well

 **Daichi:** aw :( so can I assume this means I get to keep his waffle iron???

 **Daichi:** You guys are hilarious. Tell Asahi to text his parents back so they quit bugging me.

 **Noya:** yes sawamura-sama

 **Daichi:** Don’t call me that.

 **Noya:** yes dai-chan

 **Daichi:** Stop.

 **Noya:** okay babe

 **Noya:** wait im kidding pls dont come hit me

 **Daichi:** hi noya this is suga again!!! daichi is so busy blushing with maidenly modesty that he sdakjnfsadkljdn d 89

 **Daichi:** I’m blocking your number.

 **Noya:** thats fair

“Um, Noya,” says Asahi, “I was just wondering… why are your running shoes full of… um…”

Noya turns around and manages, barely, to say, “Uh?” In high school, Asahi was pretty much always wearing his school uniform or his practice clothes or his team jersey. Now he dresses like a hip Tokyo fashion designer because, well, he _is_ a hip Tokyo fashion designer. His clothes are all classy and fitted. Mm. Those arms. Wow. And his hair is still damp from the shower, darky and kind of wavy, and the glasses, wow, just, hmm. Noya thinks he might be having a stroke.

Asahi looks away, rubbing the back of his neck. Oops. “Your shoes…?” Asahi prompts.

“Oh yeah,” said Noya. “I wore them wet a bunch of times and now they reek. So that one has baking soda in it, and that one has tomato sauce.”

“Tomato sauce,” says Asahi.

“Yeah, ‘cause I was trying the baking soda thing, and it wasn’t really working, but then in Toulouse I met this Canadian girl who was like, _oh, my dog got sprayed by a skunk once so we bathed her in tomato sauce_. Well, she said _tomato juice_ , actually, but I couldn’t find that at the grocery store so I figured tomato sauce was probably fine.” Noya points at the shoe filled with baking soda. “But I wanted to check which would work better, right, so I did tomato sauce in one and baking soda in another. It’s called A/B testing,” he adds proudly, throwing in a little marketing lingo he picked up from an Austrian dude in Romania to show how smart and worldly he’s become.

“I don’t think that’s what A/B testing is,” says Asahi, still staring at the shoes in faint horror. “Um… so are you going to… wear them…?”

“Yeah, duh. I mean, I’ll take the tomato sauce out first. For now I bought sandals,” says Noya, holding up a pair of flip-flops, the cheapest available at one of the touristy stores in Jean-Médecin. “And Band-Aids, for when I get blisters. So don’t worry, I’m good.”

“Okay,” Asahi said weakly.

“Well, c’mon, let’s go get croissants! Don’t worry, we’ll get you a coffee, too.”

With confidence and complete ignorance, Noya leads them to the first boulangerie he sees and asks for, “ _Deux croissants,_ oh yeah, and a coffee, uh, _un_ _café,_ _s’il vous plaît_ ,” which he maybe spent all of yesterday practicing to make his pronunciation sound halfway decent. He glances at Asahi to see if he looks impressed (Asahi is hanging back, obviously nervous about the prospect of someone trying to speak French to him, but he does look kind of impressed, even if the lady behind the counter does not).

“I thought you said your French wasn’t good?” Asahi says as they walk down towards the Promenade des Anglais. He’s staring up at all the buildings as they pass, too distracted to eat his croissant (Noya has already finished his). Good! He’s interested! He’s having fun!

“It sucks, yeah,” says Noya. “But I can sorta get by. See, basically, there are only five things you need to know how to say in any language: _good morning, where am I, can I eat that, where’s the bathroom,_ and _help, this swan won’t leave me alone_.”

“Hmm. The last one, um, it seems less useful than the others,” says Asahi.

“You’d be surprised,” says Noya, Professional Swan Harasser. “Look, the beach! Race you!”

“Wait, I’m holding coffee—oh my God, Noya, don’t just run across the road—!”

“Nice, right?” Noya says when Asahi catches up with him, leaning over the promenade’s railing to survey the beach below. It’s still early, but there are already a couple of sunbathers, and even a few people in the water. “We can swim later! I went yesterday. It’s freezing!”

“It looks kind of like Jodogahama Beach,” Asahi says thoughtfully, looking down at all the rocks.

“Oh,” says Noya, and tries not to feel disappointed. Asahi flew all the way out here to France and the beach looks just like another beach that he’s already been to in Japan. He really wanted to show off all the special stuff in the Mediterranean to Asahi, so that he’d be really impressed and then want to come out traveling with him again later. “You went to Jodogahama?”

“Yeah, last summer, with Suga and one of my sisters.”

“Sounds like blatant Daichi discrimination to me, Asahi,” Noya points out, and Asahi laughs.

“Actually, it was just supposed to be me and my sister, but Daichi was going hiking with Kuroo and Bokuto, and Suga was sulking, so…”

“Geez, Asahi. You’re such a pushover! Hey—let’s go hike up the hill over there. Hope you’re not afraid of heights!”

“Um—” says Asahi, but Noya is tugging on his arm, dragging him back down the Promenade des Anglais towards Castle Hill. “Wait, wait! I need to buy sunscreen! And”—he glances out over the ocean at the ominous line of greyish-black clouds way in the distance—“um, maybe an umbrella…”

“Don’t be stupid, it never rains here,” Noya says, with the confidence of someone whose knowledge is gained one hundred percent from the internet and zero percent from personal experience. But hey, that’s what everyone says, _everyone—_ people on the internet, those drunk girls he met at that nightclub in Berlin, the lady who rents out their AirBnB. The Riviera is always beautiful and sunny, especially in the summer. An _umbrella_. Pff. Yeah, right.

NICE, FRANCE, 2015

“What was it you said about it never raining here?” Asahi asks as they sprint under the opera house’s awning to crowd in with the other dismayed tourists sheltering from the downpour. Not that the cover does much good—the rain’s so heavy that Noya’s clothes are already plastered to him. “I’m trying to remember…”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Noya. He scowls and crosses his arms over his chest, shivering. The city was baking hot all day, but the rain is freezing. Damnit! Everyone knows it never rains here! Even the locals running all the touristy stores in Vieux Nice are staring up at the thunderheads with expressions of deep betrayal as they scramble to get their postcard racks and shit inside. Their first day! Their _first day!_ What is this? Karma? Divine retribution? But he’s a good person, honest! Noya glares at the storm clouds darkening the sky above them and thinks at whatever higher powers might be hanging around tormenting him _come down and fight me yourself, you candy-ass COWARDS_.

When this fails to produce any immediate results, Noya sneaks a surreptitious glance at Asahi, who is making an optimistic attempt to clean the water off his glasses with his soaking wet shirt. Asahi, of course, looks great in the rain, like he’s about to do one of those sexy magazine photoshoots where the models are all styled as if they just got back from walking into the ocean fully dressed for some reason, with his shirt clinging to him and the water running down his neck—although without his glasses he’s also squinting a lot, and, well, Noya would never go so far as to say anything about Asahi is _unsexy_ , obviously, but the squint does kind of give him an expression reminiscent of a nearsighted cocker spaniel.

“Are you cold? I have a sweater in my backpack,” Asahi offers. He gives up on his glasses and puts them back on still streaked with water. “Well, it’s probably wet now, but it might help.”

“Sure, thanks,” Noya says glumly. Normally he’d be psyched about the prospect of getting to wear Asahi’s clothes but right now he’s just cold.

“We could look for a place for dinner,” Asahi suggests. “It’s already five-thirty.”

A romantic dinner at a nice French restaurant probably becomes a whole lot less romantic when both you and your date are both dripping wet and steadily going hypothermic. Noya shakes his head and waves a bereaved goodbye to his second missed chance in a row to brush his foot seductively against Asahi’s ankle under a candlelit table. “Nah, places here aren’t even open till seven or eight. Let’s get groceries and eat at the apartment.”

They stop at the grocery by their building, which is helpfully blasting its AC, and then drip their way up to their rental, where Noya immediately strips off his soaking shirt and Asahi stoops over the tiny kitchenette sink to wring about a litre of water out of his hair. “Geez, I’m freezing,” Noya complains, pushing his own wet hair out of his face. “You want to shower first?”

“That’s okay, you can—um—oh—you—um…” Asahi trails off, and Noya looks up to see Asahi staring at him, his eyes huge behind his smudged glasses.

“What?” says Noya.

“You… your… um… you have a…”

“ _What?_ ” Noya insists. “Is it a bug or something? Is there a bug in my hair?”

“No! No, you, um, it’s just that, um…” Asahi seems to be short-circuiting. He flaps a hand in Noya’s general direction, which helpfully tells Noya fuck-all. Then Asahi gestures to his general chest area, and Noya clues in.

“Oh, the nipple ring?” says Noya, glancing down. “Didn’t I tell you about that?”

“Ah, no. Nope. Definitely didn’t hear about that,” says Asahi. He’s still staring, at least until he looks up and meets Noya’s gaze. Then he looks hurriedly away again, twisting his watch around on his wrist and examining the band with unwarranted intensity.

“Oh yeah? It was pretty wild,” says Noya. Does Asahi think it’s weird? Is that what’s happening? Ryuu, once he managed to stop howling with laughter, assured him people would think it was sexy. Still, he might as well tell the story. “So I actually wanted my ear pierced, but the lady at the store didn’t speak much English, and my Polish is really shitty, so I guess she got confused? She was just like _shirt off_ and I was like _seems weird, but okay_ , and then bam, two minutes later there’s a needle through my nipple.”

“Oh my God,” Asahi says faintly. His horror seems to have overwritten his embarrassment. “You wanted… and she just…”

“Yep,” says Noya. It doesn’t quite qualify as the worst shock of Noya’s life, but it’s definitely up there. “Probably not the best piercing shop, looking back. I mean, she did it sterile and everything, I’m not _that_ stupid. The lady was just a jerk.”

“Did it hurt?” asks Asahi.

 _Horrified fascination_ isn’t the exact same thing as _passionate arousal_ , but hey, Noya will take what he can get. “Holy shit, yeah. I cried like a baby. The lady was gearing up to pierce the other one too and I was like _hey, might as well, I’m in it now_ , but I kept flinching so eventually she just kicked me out. It’s healed now, though. Looks pretty cool, right? Hey,” Noya adds, struck by a sudden fit of inspiration (intense thirst for your hot ex-teammate being, after all, the mother of invention), “wanna touch it?”

“Um,” says Asahi. “Is that—are you—is that a joke, or…”

“Nah,” says Noya, because, as he thought during the nipple piercing incident itself, well, he’s in it now. “I mean, you don’t have to. Like, I won’t be offended.”

“I want to,” Asahi says quickly, and then goes red, and Noya thinks _holy shit, I take it all back, I love the rain, it should rain here every day_. Very tentatively, Asahi reaches out and rolls the ball on one end of the bar between his thumb and his index finger. It’s not an actual ring anymore, because Noya kept having terrifying visions of the ring getting caught on his shirt every time he undressed, so he went to a store in London and got the hardware switched out the second it was healed. Also, and this is definitely the more relevant point right now, _Asahi is touching his nipple_. He’s fantasized about this exact scenario a billion times. Well, okay, not this _exact_ scenario, but—this is hands-down the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to him, and he’s had a hell of a lot of exciting things happen to him in his nineteen-and-a-half years. He might die. He might pass out. He might get a boner, although he’s still so cold he’s shivering, so maybe not. Tough to say, right now.

Noya puts a hand on Asahi’s side, right above his hip, in a very casual way, in a way that says (he hopes), _hey, you’re touching my nipple, I’m into it, just putting that out there, no pressure, though_. He looks up at Asahi, who is looking down at him, biting his lip, still blushing bright red, and—

—and Asahi jerks back, his face scrunching up as he sneezes four times in a row. The Mood, such as it was, is ruined.

“Whoa, you okay?” says Noya. “Dude, I didn’t think people actually got sick from getting caught in the rain. Maybe _you_ should shower first.”

“Okay, um, yeah, I’m going to, um, I’m going to do that,” says Asahi, shoving his glasses up to rub at his watering eyes. Then he escapes into the bathroom, leaving Noya to strip off his wet shorts and collapse into one of the spindly little chairs at the equally spindly little table. Holy shit. Holy _shit_ . He does the only thing he can think to do right now, which is pull out his phone and frantically text Ryuu _dude he touched my nipple_. His phone buzzes a couple of minutes later, and he scrambles to open the message, ready to receive Ryuu’s words of wisdom, but—

 **Kageyama:** what?

 **Kageyama:** who did?

 **Kageyama:** what happened?

 **Kageyama:** should I do something?

Oops. Shit. He could have sworn he was messaging Ryuu. Okay, time for some damage control.

 **Noya:** dont worry about it dude

 **Kageyama:** okay

Noya groans and shoves his phone away from him. He basically only has Kageyama’s number so he can text him _hey tell shouyou to text me back_ when Shouyou doesn’t check his messages fast enough. He knows exactly what’s going to happen now, and yep, there goes his phone again—

 **Shouyou:** hey noya-san!!!! who touched your nipple?? are you okay???

 **Noya:** yeah im trying to hit on asahi its all good

 **Shouyou:** oh wow!!!! asahi-san!!! cool!!!! good luck!!!!

Shouyou is the best kind of friend because he seems to be of the opinion that everything Noya does is cool by virtue of the fact that Noya is the one doing it. Noya’s pretty sure he could tell Shouyou he’s planning on assassinating the prime minister of Japan and Shouyou would just say _cool!!!! have fun!!!!_

“Hey, um, I’m done,” says Asahi, and Noya fumbles his phone in surprise. Shit. He didn’t even hear Asahi come into the room. Asahi has opted to put on pajama pants and a sweater, rather than emerging from the bathroom clad only in a towel and a seductive cloud of steam to facilitate ravishing Noya immediately on the creaky pull-out couch, but that’s okay. It’s only day one.

By the time Noya gets out of the shower, finally a normal temperature again, Asahi has already started making fried rice on their tiny stovetop. They eat it at the table with the rain still pouring down outside the window, spraying off rooftops and battering the potted plants sitting out on people’s balconies. Asahi shows Noya a couple of pictures on his phone of some designs he finished recently, some shirts and a couple of jackets (“I like that one,” says Noya, pointing to a shirt patterned with blue and orange flowers so bright they’re kind of obnoxious; Asahi grins and says, “Yeah, I thought you might.”). They make bets on what Ryuu and Kiyoko’s wedding is going to be like, concluding that the only certainty is Ryuu bawling his eyes out through the whole thing. The rain lessens to a gentle drizzle, then lets up entirely, leaving the streets glistening in the weak evening light as the clouds dissipate.

“So, what d’you wanna do now?” Noya asks. It’s not even nine. They could go out to a bar, or get ice cream, or walk down to the beach, or stay in and get back to feeling each other up. Lots of options.

But Asahi, who has been steadily drooping against the wall for the past hour or so, yawns and says, “Actually, I might just go to bed. Sorry. The time change. I’m still kind of…”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, totally,” says Noya. “That’s cool. Yeah. Go for it.”


	2. Chapter 2

BUCHAREST, ROMANIA, 2014

Noya leaves Japan a few weeks after he graduates high school. He doesn’t really know what to do with himself, and he happens to see a picture of the Parthenon that one of Saeko’s friends posted on her Instagram, so on an impulse he decides _hey, I’m gonna go see that_ and books a one-way plane ticket. His poor social studies grades _immediately_ bite him in the ass: it turns out the Parthenon is in Athens, not Rome, and also Rome is different from Romania, which is where he ends up. Hey, who knew? But Bucharest is pretty sweet, and he just decides to wing it from there.

To be completely honest, he never _really_ expected to keep in touch with Asahi after high school. The crush thing, well, it hadn’t really gone anywhere. Oh, Noya _tried_ , obviously, but flirting with guys was _hard_ , at least when the guy you were trying to flirt with was Azumane Asahi. Noya constantly struggled to find a balance between, “Awesome serve, Asahi-san!” (too subtle) and, “So, wanna feel me up in the supply closet later?” (not _quite_ subtle enough). Add to this the fact that Asahi’s presence seemed to reduce Noya’s baseline brain functionality by at least forty percent, and Noya’s efforts at flirting usually ended up along the lines of him shouting, “Look, Asahi-san, no hands!” as Shouyou sped down the mountain road on his bike with Noya perched precariously on his handlebars.

Asahi and Daichi and Suga came to some of Karasuno’s games when Noya was in third year, but Daichi and Suga were both in university and Asahi ended up moving to Tokyo, where he seemed very busy being stylish and successful. Noya told himself _okay, time to get your shit together and move on, buddy_ , which was frankly easier said than done, what with Ryuu and Kiyoko starting to date and being all cute and stuff. He figured, though, that Asahi was definitely meeting lots of cool people in Tokyo. That was fine! That was good! He and Asahi never really talked that much outside of volleyball practices anyway.

(At least, they didn’t talk that much in real life. Noya spent a good portion of his high school career industriously supplementing real life with vivid daydreams about making out with Asahi in the club room after practice—although to be honest, most of his daydreams hadn’t involved a whole lot of talking either. In retrospect, this habit might also explain his poor social studies grades, actually.)

But back to Bucharest, where Noya is bored and lonely one day waiting for his train, and this lady walks by with a huge, shaggy, mopey-faced dog, so on an impulse Noya snaps a surreptitious picture and sends it to Asahi.

 **Noya:** <image>

 **Noya:** this u?

 **Asahi:** aw no… I wish though :(

 **Noya:** u wish u were a dog???

 **Asahi:** dogs don’t have to go to creative meetings so… yeah

And apparently that’s all it takes, one blurry dog photo and a bad, boredom-induced joke, because after that they start messaging pretty regularly, and then one day when Noya’s too tired to text he just calls Asahi instead, and the next week Asahi calls _him_ , and Noya does not update Asahi’s LINE contact name with sparkly hearts and/or an eggplant emoji but boy, is he ever tempted.

The thing is, in high school, he always thought Asahi was mega cool, totally amazing, just the absolute best—and of course he still thinks that, obviously, because _hell_ , it’s _Asahi_ —but now he actually knows more about him, beyond just the basic facts that he’s tall and beefy and has the nicest hair and the _wickedest_ spike. Noya knows now, for instance, that Asahi has two older sisters, one of whom seriously concussed him when he was seven by throwing an entire case of canned tuna at his head. Noya also knows now that Asahi got the same sister back by pushing her into a pond when she was fourteen, right in front of the boy she liked (“I didn’t _mean_ to push her, I just bumped into her! It was an accident!” claims Asahi, Bratty Younger Brother and Certified Liar). Crushing on your hot upperclassman is one thing, Noya decides, but _this_ is the kind of stuff that makes you full-on fall in love with a guy.

In short, while Noya initially thinks that the whole long-distance thing might douse the passionate flames of his high school crush, since Asahi isn’t around to be beefy and have nice hair in person, in fact the exact opposite happens. Long-distance friendship pours gasoline on his high school crush and sets it ablaze with a flamethrower.

NICE, FRANCE, 2015

“You know what’s nuts?” says Noya. He adjusts his backpack over his shoulders and tests the ground tentatively before taking another step. The Mediterranean climate leaves the dirt here dry, loose, and rocky, liable to slip under foot, especially when one has made the questionable decision to hike up a mountain in flip-flops. “You know what’s totally nuts? I read that they reintroduced brown bears into the Pyrenees a couple years back. They _reintroduced_ them. Some crazy biologists looked at a bunch of mountains that had no bears and thought _you know what would make these mountains better? Bears_. Who does that?”

“Well, um, they’re probably important for the ecosystem,” says Asahi, beacon of rationality, who is pretending not to hover behind Noya in case he wipes out again. “If the smaller animals don’t have any natural predators in the area, then their populations get out of control… like, you know, in Miyajima, with the deer…”

“Right, like maybe the French government wants to keep down tourist backpacker populations,” Noya says, grinning, and Asahi laughs.

“Um…” Asahi says a moment later, very casually, “so, the Pyrenees… is that where we are right now, or…?”

“Nah, we’re closer to the Alps,” says Noya.

“Right. Right. And… are there bears in the Alps, or…”

“Pff. No,” says Noya, approximately twenty percent certain that this is true.

They hike a ways further up the mountain, the ocean down below vast and glinting in the sun between scrubby bushes and stunted trees, the dry grass rustling underfoot. There’s no shade up here, and under the blazing midday sun Noya can feel the sweat dripping down his back, clinging to his already-damp t-shirt. When he looked up this trail online last night, he read that the path dipped down close to the water on the loop back. He doesn’t have his swim trunks with him, but he doesn’t mind going in his underwear. Or hey, maybe he can convince Asahi to go skinny. There’s an idea. Mm. He glances back at Asahi, accidentally meets Asahi’s gaze, and tries to look very innocent, like he’s not currently in the process of picturing him naked.

After a while the path forks, one offshoot leading up a steep, rocky slope and the other continuing to meander around the mountain. “You wanna go up or around?” Noya asks, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun to squint up towards the peak. “Up’s probably faster, but the grip on these sandals really isn’t that—hey, what’s up, you good?”

Asahi is standing a few feet away, staring back the way they came. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “Yeah, um, sorry, I just thought I heard something…”

“Probably another hiker,” says Noya, doing his best to ignore the irrational lurch of alarm in his stomach. “So what d’you think? Up or around?”

“Let’s go around so you don’t slip,” says Asahi. He frowns. “Wait, there, did you hear that?”

Noya did, in fact, hear that—a sort of heavy rustling in the brush, coincidentally the exact sound he would expect to be made by a large bear trundling through dry grass. Could Asahi fight a bear? Physically, yeah, he thinks Asahi could probably fight a bear, but psychologically? No chance. “Yeah, yeah,” Noya says dismissively, trying to sound unconcerned so Asahi won’t freak out, “let’s just keep going, okay?”

“Um, sure, okay,” says Asahi. “So… you really think that’s just…”

“Just a hiker, yeah, just a hiker for sure,” Noya lies.

The rustling starts up again as they walk, a little more insistent now, a little louder, like its source is drawing closer. Noya quickens his pace slightly, his sandals slapping in the dirt, Asahi following close behind him.

They make it about twenty metres before the bushes to their left explode and something charges out onto the path, something brown and frenzied and definitely _not_ hiker-shaped. Noya yelps and clutches instinctively at Asahi, who helpfully freezes and clutches at Noya— _it’s a bear it’s a bear it’s a bear,_ Noya thinks hysterically, _it’s a bear that some stupid French scientists stuck on this stupid mountain, we’re going to have to fight a bear and then the stupid fucking ecosystem is going to collapse again—_

He blinks. It’s not a bear. It’s way too small. It looks more like a—

He blinks again. “Huh. I didn’t know they had wild boars here,” says Noya. Shouyou lives way far out in the country in Miyagi and sees them all the time, but Noya’s never run into one himself before. It just looks like a really ugly, really angry pig, its little demon piggy eyes glaring at them vengefully. “Aw, it’s kind of cute, isn’t it? In, like, an ugly kinda way.”

“It’s not, it’s really really not,” Asahi says nervously.

The boar snorts and stamps its feet, kicking up clouds of reddish dust. It’s bigger than Noya expected, coming almost all the way to his waist. And those tusks, man. Those tusks look nasty.

“Um,” says Asahi. “Um… should we… um…”

“Run, yeah, yep, I think that’s a pretty good idea,” says Noya, and they take off up the mountain at a sprint just as the boar starts to charge.

There are some definite upsides to their hiking expedition, the major one being that they manage to survive it without getting gored by a pissed-off pig. But Noya would have to say there are some downsides as well, like for instance getting chased all over the mountain by said pissed-off pig, and then getting sort of turned around in the process, and then clueing in that they’re headed towards Antibes instead of Nice, and then having to backtrack up over the mountain as the daylight fades into purplish dusk around them, both of them giggling nervously whenever they hear something move in the brush. Noya has never been so relieved to see the city in his life. They take the bus back downtown, both wilting with exhaustion; they eat their leftover fried rice from last night; and they crash, immediately. Super romantic.

ANTWERP, BELGIUM, 2014

“Hey Asahi, you need to post more pictures on your Instagram,” Noya complains over the phone. He’s lying on the lumpy mattress of the bottom bunk in his Antwerp hostel, kicking absently at the mattress of the empty bunk above him, which sags down through the slats. The drains in the hostel’s showers are permanently clogged, the carpeting is so suspicious he just tries not to look at it too closely, and he’s pretty sure the Australian dudes in the dorm across the hall keep stealing his instant noodles out of the kitchen. It is neither the best nor the worst hostel Noya has stayed at so far.

“I post pictures!” Asahi protests. It’s midday for Noya, but early evening for Asahi, and Noya can make out the noise of traffic in the background as Asahi walks to the train station.

“ _Yeah_ , like, one generic picture of Shinjuku Gyoen every two months. That basically doesn’t even count. Put more pictures of yourself! The people want to see you!”

“The people? What people?” says Asahi.

“Me! I have to stalk you through Suga-san’s profile instead! D’you know how many dumb pictures of ducks he posts? Like a million! I have to dig through all of those! It’s so bad, Asahi, _so_ bad—”

“We could video call,” Asahi suggests.

“It’s not the same! I need that sweet HD,” says Noya. And then, without expecting anything to come of it, he adds, “Hey, y’know what would be _super_ HD? If you just flew over to hang out with me. What about it, huh? We could, like, drink wine, and climb mountains, and stuff—”

“Okay,” says Asahi, which prompts Noya to sit up so fast he slams his forehead into the slats of the top bunk. He’s thrown out the suggestion before, probably a dozen times by now, but Asahi’s always noncommittal about it. Noya kind of figured he wasn’t interested but was too polite to say so outright.

“Shit. Fuck. _Ow_. Whoa, wait, what? _Okay_ like, like… _okay?_ Like, for real?”

“Um, I, well, I don’t know, I’d have to ask for the time off first, and look at the cost, and, um,” Asahi says, pausing to breathe as he settles into methodically spiralling through every worst-case scenario imaginable. “Um. I don’t know, maybe it’s not—I mean, or, oh, were you just joking? Because—”

“No! No way! You should totally come! Where d’you want to go?”

“Um, I don’t know that much about Europe,” Asahi says cautiously. “Wherever you’re going to be in a couple months is fine.”

“Dude, I don’t plan that far ahead,” says Noya. “Like, I don’t even know where I’m gonna be next week.”

“Oh my God,” mutters Asahi. “Noya, just talking to you stresses me out…”

Noya laughs, but he’s already scheming. Asahi has made the critical error of getting him excited. Godzilla himself could hold Noya upside-down by the ankles off the peak of the Cathedral of Our Lady and roar _Nishinoya Yuu, just drop it already or else I’ll drop YOU_ , and Noya would still be on his phone, frantically booking an AirBnB someplace exciting and romantic. Noya’s mind is made up. Asahi _is_ coming, and he _is_ going to have the best time of his life, whether he wants to or not.

Trouble is, Noya meant it when he said he didn’t plan ahead. He’s spent the past several months drifting around to wherever looked interesting. He needs guidance. Wisdom. Enlightenment. He goes across the hall to the dorm with all the Australians and knocks on the door.

“Oh, hey, man. What’s up?” says Australian #1, who answers the door in shorts and no shirt, despite the fact that it’s, like, four degrees outside. Out of necessity, Noya’s English has improved considerably since he started traveling, but he still has to concentrate hard to understand the Australians’ weird, pinched accents, which is too bad, because Europe is _infested_ with Australians. They’re _everywhere._

“I need advice,” says Noya. “Where’s the best city to take someone you’re trying to seduce?”

“Took my girl to the Adelaide Oval once,” offers Australian #2, also _sans_ shirt.

“Didn’t your girl tell you to rack off after that, Charlie?” says Australian #1.

“She did, yeah, she did,” says Australian #2, a.k.a. Charlie.

“Yeah, pull your head in, Charlie,” Australian #3 (shirt but no pants) says scornfully. “No one goes to _Adelaide_ for a root. It’s gotta be Cleveland, right?”

“Cleveland? You having a go? _Cleveland?_ ”

“No, listen, it’s got the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, right?”

“Does it? Cleveland? Deadset?”

“It does, yeah—”

“Paris, right?” interrupts Australian #1. “‘Course it’s Paris. Everyone knows that. City of smashing your back out.”

“Don’t think that’s right, Jack,” Charlie says doubtfully. “Anyway, dunno, didn’t like it much when we were there. Too busy.”

“Bloody oath, yeah, too busy,” agrees Australian #3. “But France, though, yeah, anywhere else in France for sure. Like, the Riviera, or what’s it, with the castles, the Loire, right, the Loire.”

“Yeah, yeah, France,” chorus the other two.

“France. Cool, thanks,” says Noya, who has understood, at most, thirty percent of the conversation. France! Duh! Why didn’t he think of that? France has wine, and… uh… more wine… probably other stuff, too… he’ll figure it out.

“Two weeks,” Noya explains next time he calls Asahi. “We’ll do the whole Riviera. We can go to the beach! So? What d’you say?”

“Um, well—” Asahi begins.

“Is that a _yes_? Did I hear a _yes?_ ”

“I—it’s just—um—I’m kind of nervous,” Asahi admits. “I haven’t traveled much, so…”

“Don’t worry about it!” says Noya, to whom not worrying about things comes much easier than it does to Asahi. “You’ll be with me, so it’ll be fine. All you have to do is get on a plane. Hey, maybe we can get you one of those _unaccompanied minor_ lanyards. What about it?”

“Okay, I don’t think I need _that_ ,” says Asahi.

PRINCIPALITY OF MONACO, 2015

“Okay, the map says the palace should be right here,” says Noya.

“Hmm,” says Asahi. He drags the back of his hand across his forehead to wipe away the sweat and studies the structure in front of them thoughtfully. “I didn’t expect it to look so much like a parking garage.”

“Wow, Asahi, you’re _sooo_ funny…” Noya frowns at the map displayed on his phone, the little blue dot showing their location sitting right beside the pin marked _Le Palais des Princes de Monaco_. He looks at the parking garage. He turns the phone around, in case that makes a difference (it doesn’t). He shakes the phone, just to see if anything happens (no improvement). “Gah! What the heck! Where is it? How can we miss an entire palace? This is the stupidest city in the world!”

“Technically, it’s a sovereign city-state, country, and microstate,” Asahi says. While Noya has been trying to navigate through all the stupid little squiggly streets, Asahi has helpfully been reading his guidebook—yes, he brought an actual guidebook, like some kind of retired dad (Noya is willing to bet all his savings, which in fairness are basically nothing at this point, that Daichi bought it for him). “Apparently Monaco is the second-smallest sovereign state in the world, after Vatican City.”

“Thanks, Asahi! Super helpful!” snaps Noya. He glares at the parking garage, hoping to intimidate it into submission, but no luck. It remains firmly a parking garage, set right on the edge of a cliff, the Mediterranean a dazzling blue beyond it.

“Sorry,” says Asahi, not looking particularly sorry at all, in fact looking like he’s trying to hide a smile, and not even trying very hard, at that. Noya doesn’t remember him being this much of a jerk in high school. He’s kind of into it.

“This is fucked up,” Noya declares. His t-shirt is soaked through with sweat and the unrelenting sun is giving him a headache and his flip-flops are rubbing and he’s decided right now that he hates Monaco. It’s full of rich people and stairs and absolutely nothing else. “The smallest country in the world—”

“Second smallest,” Asahi reminds him.

“—second smallest, fine, _whatever_ , and we’re lost. How? _How?_ Are we _stupid_?”

“Hey, there’s no _we_ here,” says Asahi. “ _You_ were the one who said you knew how to get there. Oh, did you know Monaco has its own language? Monégasque. It’s Gallo-Italic. I guess that’s what’s written under the French on all the street signs.”

“What the hell does Monaco need its own language for? There are, like, twenty people living here—”

“Thirty-seven thousand, actually,” says Asahi. “And about forty-eight thousand commute in from Italy and France every day to—oof! Hey! Don’t hit me!” Asahi is a foot taller than Noya and probably twice his weight, but also way too chickenshit to actually _do_ anything with all that muscle, rendering him utterly defenceless, like a little baby bird.

“If you read me one more fact about this dumb country I’m gonna throw your book off this cliff and I’m gonna push you down after it,” Noya threatens.

“Fine, but you’ll still be stuck here, in front of the parking garage that’s served as the official residence of Monaco’s royal family for over seven centuries,” says Asahi. This time he’s smart enough to catch Noya’s wrist and stop the momentum of his fist with sheer brute strength before it connects with his stomach. It’s almost like they’re holding hands. Cool.

“Okay, I give up. Let’s go ask that lady for directions,” says Noya, pointing down the sidewalk at a woman walking an improbably tiny Chihuahua. “Asahi, try to look less scary so she doesn’t think we’re going to mug her, okay?”

“I don’t—” Asahi begins, sounding hurt, but Noya is already waving at the dog lady.

“Hi! _Salut!_ ” he calls out. “English? No? _Français? Oui?_ Ah, shit.” His English is reasonable enough now that he can speak without having to think too hard beforehand, but for French he still needs time to string words together into a semi-coherent sentence. “Uh. Okay, one sec. _Uno momento._ No, wait, shit, that’s Italian. Whatever. Uh. _Le palais? Où?_ ”

The lady says something in French that Noya can’t make out at all. She looks at his uncomprehending face and sighs, then points down, over the stone wall built up to separate the sidewalk from the sheer drop down to another street thirty feet below. Beyond that is another drop, and another, and another, and… holy shit, there’s a million terraces. Who the hell built this ridiculous city? What kind of weird medieval drugs were they on?

The lady points down the sidewalk and says something else; this time Noya catches the word _escaliers_. Great. More stairs. The least these crazy city planners could do is install some ziplines or something.

“ _Merci,_ ” says Noya, and bows (he stills hasn’t broken the habit, but the Europeans don’t seem to mind, probably because they’re all seven-thousandth in line for some monarchy or other). Then he turns to Asahi and explains, “It’s way down there. We have to go down like a million more stairs.”

“Okay,” says Asahi, and sneezes twice. He’s been doing that all morning.

“You _sure_ you don’t have a cold? Really sure?”

Asahi nods. He sneezes again.

“Really _really_ sure?” Noya prods.

“I’m sure! I feel fine!” Asahi insists, and sniffles unconvincingly.

The palace isn’t actually that exciting, when they finally stagger up to it (they have to go _down_ a million stairs and then _up_ a huge hill to reach it, how dumb is _that_ ), but the view from the clifftop gardens is amazing, the ocean stretching out ahead and the port way, way down below, with all the rich people’s yachts moored in neat white rows, bobbing like oversized seagulls. There’s a statue of a naked lady in the garden (“Hey Asahi, take a picture of me grabbing the statue’s boobs,” says Noya; “I’m _not_ taking a picture of you grabbing the statue’s boobs,” says Asahi, “no, don’t—oh my God, stop, _please_ stop, I don’t know you—”) and a whole bunch of greenish-grey lizards sunbathing all over the rocks (“Hey Asahi, take a picture of me kissing this lizard,” says Noya; “Okay, fine,” says Asahi, and then laughs until he cries when the lizard skitters up Noya’s arm and into his t-shirt).

They sit by the aquarium to eat the sandwiches Noya made for them this morning, and then wander around the port until they’re both hot and bored (“How fast d’you think I’d get arrested if I just, like, jumped in?” asks Noya, but the panicked look Asahi gives him in response is enough to stop that line of inquiry before it develops any further). In a courtyard out of the sun, they get ice cream and collapse along the edge of a planting bed with big palm trees towering over them. Noya finishes his ice cream in a couple of minutes, and then gets to sit there and remember that oh yeah, Asahi is the slowest eater in probably the entire universe. He doesn’t really mind, except that—

“Asahi, it’s dripping, Asahi, _Asahi—_ ”

“I know, I know, I’ve got it!”

“Not _there_ , at the _back_ — _Asahi—_ ”

Always cool-headed in an emergency, Noya lurches forward and licks up the dribble of ice cream running down the side of the cone himself. As a totally unanticipated side-effect, this brings him within a couple inches of Asahi’s surprised face, separated only by a half-melted cone of jasmine ice cream. Noya sees Asahi’s throat bob as he swallows, and he sees Asahi’s eyes flick down to Noya’s mouth just for a second, and he sees Asahi lean forward just a tiny tiny bit, and he thinks _fuck it, I’m gonna go for it_. The ice cream is already starting to drip again, but that is now inconsequential. Noya grabs Asahi’s wrist and shoves it down so that the ice cream is out of the way. He leans in, and—

—and some rich asshole chooses that exact moment to tear down the street in his obnoxiously loud sports car, startling them both so badly that Asahi fumbles his ice cream and Noya loses his balance. The ice cream splats on the paving stones right beside Noya, who lands right on one knee, scraping off a good amount of skin.

“Dumb jerk,” Noya mutters, brushing street grime off his oozing knee as he gets back to his feet. He glances at Asahi, who is now adjusting his glasses awkwardly and avoiding Noya’s gaze. God. Noya hates this stupid country, or principality, or whatever the hell it is. “Sorry about your ice cream,” he tells Asahi.

“Ah, that’s okay. I was pretty much done anyway,” says Asahi. “Are you, um, is your knee alright?”

“Yeah, I’ll find a bathroom to rinse it out.” His knee is throbbing and already starting to dribble blood down his shin, but that’s nothing compared to the earth-shattering disappointment of not getting a chance to kiss Asahi. Not to be dramatic or anything.

“There’s the one at the train station. I guess we should start heading back anyway,” Asahi suggests.

“Yeah,” Noya says glumly. He pulls out his phone to check the map and then brightens. “Or, hey, I looked it up, and Èze is only about eight K from here. We could get our bags from the train station and hike it. I bet the view’s great.”

“That’s a pretty long way to walk with all our stuff,” Asahi says dubiously. “And, um… you’re in flip-flops…”

The tomato sauce thing did not really work out. Noya bid a sorrowful farewell to his old running shoes that morning as he shoved them unceremoniously in the garbage. They were falling apart anyway, after a year of walking all over Europe; it was time. He’s been looking out for a second-hand store to buy a new pair, but all the second-hand stores along the Riviera just seem to sell designer stuff, which is interesting for Asahi, but way less interesting for Noya, who teeters permanently on the brink of being flat-out broke—so flip-flops it is, for now.

“Don’t worry about it,” Noya says, waving away Asahi’s concerns. “I’ve got so many Band-Aids on my feet it’s like I’m wearing socks. I don’t even feel the blisters anymore! Besides, we don’t have that much stuff. And you’re huge!” Noya smacks Asahi in the bicep. Holy shit, his arms are so firm. Asahi could probably carry his bag on one arm and Noya on the other. That’s so hot. Okay, no, focus up. “Don’t tell me you can’t carry one little bag!”

“Um, well, okay, if you’re sure,” says Asahi, although he still looks doubtful. He picks up what he can salvage of his ice cream off the pavement and throws it in a nearby garbage bin, and then the two of them start the arduous process of trying to navigate all the way back up to the train station at the top of the cliff.

At the station Asahi collects their bags from the storage locker while Noya does his best to clean up his skinned knee in the bathroom sink, slapping a couple of Band-Aids on for good measure. He pulls up the map on his phone, checks and double-checks the directions—no way is he getting Asahi lost, not on an 8-K hike, not after suffering the indignity of struggling to navigate Monaco’s weird up-and-down streets all day—and he and Asahi set off along the street, headed for Èze.

This works very nicely for the first, oh, forty minutes. The streets lead them up higher and higher, so that they have a view out over the whole city—country—whatever, with the ocean beyond that and a nice breeze alleviating the heat of the sun, which is doing its best to bake them as it beats down from the cloudless sky above. On their other side, hills stretch up even further, covered in scraggly green bushes and dropping away dramatically into rocky valleys. Noya splits his time between checking the map, admiring the scenery, and admiring Asahi admiring the scenery

“Nice, right?” says Noya.

“Yeah, wow,” says Asahi, shielding his eyes from the sun to stare across the road, where the hill drops away and meanders down towards the ocean, and Noya thinks _ha! Yes! You’re having fun!_

Then, around minute forty-one, the sidewalk ends.

“Um,” says Asahi. “So…”

Crap. Why is Google Maps out to get him today? What did he do to anger its fussy little algorithm? They’re already almost halfway to Èze. If they turn around now, they’ll have to walk all the way back to Monaco, and then wait for a train to show up.

“It’s fine, we can keep going,” Noya assures him. “See, there’s a sidewalk across the road.”

“I think that’s the road shoulder,” says Asahi. “Um, maybe we should go back…”

“Asahi! You’re not _giving up_ , are you?”

“Sometimes giving up is okay,” says Asahi. “Like when it means not getting hit by a truck.”

“We won’t be on it for long,” Noya says confidently, although he actually has no idea. But Google Maps wouldn’t tell them to walk an hour and twenty minutes along the edge of a highway, right? It totally wouldn’t. Alright, it’s done him dirty before, but it always—well, usually—well, _sometimes_ comes through in the end. He takes out his phone and glares at it, thinking _don’t screw this up for me, buddy_ at it as hard as he can to intimidate the maps app telepathically. Then he sets off along the highway, with Asahi trailing reluctantly behind him.

“Hey, um… Noya? Are you sure you don’t want to turn back?” Asahi says half an hour later, when they’re still walking along the highway shoulder, with the occasional car shooting by on one side and a sheer drop down the cliff on the other beyond the road barrier.

It takes Noya a moment to register that Asahi’s speaking to him. His skinned knee has started bleeding through the Band-Aids, and he’s beginning to think that maybe Asahi was right to be skeptical about the whole backpacking-in-flip-flop things, and every single part of his body, _every single part_ , is dripping with sweat. He’s settled into his end-of-tournament headspace, the tunnel vision that always kicked in during the last set of the last game of the day, when he was too tired to move but somehow had to keep moving anyway, and so shut down non-essential physiological functions such as thinking just to keep going.

“Huh? What?” says Noya, and then, when his sun-fried brain manages to decipher the complexities of Asahi’s question: “Duh! We’re over halfway! It’s _way_ further to go back now, _okay?_ ”

And yeah, maybe he says it kind of a little more forcefully than he intended, maybe in fact he kind of snaps it, maybe he’s filled with a sudden, irrational, exhausted, overheated flash of blind rage, directed at Asahi solely because he has the misfortune of being within the blast zone.

“Okay, okay, sorry!” Asahi says. He’s quiet for a moment before he adds, very cautiously, “And, um… you’re _really_ sure we’re going the right—”

“Yes! God! Chill out!”

“Don’t yell at me, I was just—”

“I wasn’t yelling at you!”

“You’re yelling at me right now!”

“ _I’m not!_ ”

They lapse into an uncomfortable, irritable silence after that. Eventually they hit another road that branches off the highway and start down that, which should be better, except that Noya is too pissed off to focus on anything other than how pissed off he is, until even that fades and he forgets how pissed off he is in favour of fantasizing in explicit detail about the biggest, coldest popsicle known to man… at least the size of his whole head… and he’ll eat it and the stick will say he’s won another giant popsicle, and then he’ll eat _that_ giant popsicle… mmm…

His sandal catches on a crack in the concrete and he pitches forward, just barely avoiding wiping out and skinning his other knee when Asahi grabs his backpack and hauls him upright.

“Let’s stop for a minute,” says Asahi.

“I’m fine,” Noya says automatically. “We’re almost there.”

“Okay, well, I want to stop,” says Asahi. Noya blinks at him dazedly until he sort of comes into focus. He looks just as hot and worn-out as Noya feels, and Noya thinks _oh shit, he flew out here for a neat vacation and I just made him walk eight kilometres along a highway for literally no reason, shit shit shit, this is MEGA unromantic._ A few feet up the road there’s a pull-off for a little lookout with a few cars parked, so they stagger up to that and collapse in the dirt against the low stone wall bordering it. Asahi puts on more sunscreen. Noya scratches dried blood off his leg and mopes quietly. He wishes he’d brought a snack. He also wishes he’d been less of a jerk. But _man_ , he wishes he brought a snack.

“Do you want rice crackers?” Asahi asks. He sounds tentative, like he’s worried Noya might snap at him again, which Noya would normally feel bad about, except that _rice crackers, hell yeah_. There is absolutely _nothing_ in the _world_ that could _possibly_ be as incredible as walking almost two hours along a blazing hot road in France and then being handed a _whole bag of rice crackers, a WHOLE BAG._

He rips open the bag Asahi hands him, shoves a handful in his mouth, looks Asahi dead in the eyes and says, completely serious, trying not to spray too many crumbs, “I love you.” This is marriage-level shit.

“Oh, ha, um, it’s, well, I had them anyway, so…” Asahil trails off, and then suddenly becomes very focused on fixing his hair.

Noya feels marginally more human with every rice cracker he eats. He’s nearly done the bag when Asahi, who seems to be starting to recover from Noya’s unsolicited declaration of adoration, says, “Did I tell you about the first time Daichi and Suga came to see me in Tokyo?”

Noya shakes his head and perks up attentively. He _lives_ for gossip about his ex-upperclassmen. For instance, Ryuu had managed to find out from Daichi that Suga once got a two-day suspension from the volleyball club in first year for throwing Asahi’s shoe out the window during math class. Noya can still barely think about it without cracking up.

“It was a total disaster,” says Asahi. “Daichi and Suga spent the whole day fighting—”

“ _What?_ ” Noya says in disbelief. He never once saw Daichi and Suga fight in the whole two years he overlapped with them in high school. He never even saw them get annoyed with each other, not even a little bit, not _once_. “No way! What do those two even fight about?”

“I don’t know, it was something stupid—who got the window seat on the train back to Miyagi, I think that was it. They wouldn’t shut up about it, and we were walking all over the city so they were both getting tired and that made it worse. And then, um.” Asahi puts his hand over his mouth, like he’s trying to forcibly restrain his grin. “And then Suga wanted to go to this one restaurant for dinner, but it took us a while to find it, so we got there pretty late. There was this kid at the table beside us who’d ordered ramen—the waiter brought the kid’s order out while we were waiting, and the kid immediately spilled the whole bowl all over himself, and Daichi just, um, he just sort of started sobbing.”

“He did _not!_ ” says Noya. He’s seen Daichi cry before, but over _serious_ stuff, like losing qualifier games, or winning qualifier games, or, well, pretty much exclusively in the context of qualifier games, whatever their outcome, now that he thinks about it. Not over _ramen_. _“Daichi-san?_ Are you messing with me? You’re messing with me, right?”

“I’m not!” Asahi protests, snorting with laughter. “He just kept saying _I could’ve eaten that!_ Me and Suga, um, we just sort of sat there, we didn’t really know what to do…”

“Are you telling me this ‘cause I get cranky when I’m hungry too?” Noya asks suspiciously, although honestly, he can’t really bring himself to care. The image of Daichi losing it over some kid’s spilled ramen is just too good. He’s going to text Ryuu about the _second_ he has Wi-Fi.

“No!” Asahi yelps. “I—no! I just thought it was funny! I, um, I wasn’t even thinking about that—! Uh, not that—”

“Relax, big guy,” says Noya, bumping his shoulder against Asahi’s, or as near to Asahi’s shoulder as he can reach. “I had rice crackers. I’m good. Hey, y’know what—I think that’s Èze right down there, see? We should be there in no time.”

ÈZE, FRANCE, 2015

“Um, so, tell me again where we’re staying?” says Asahi, hanging back to watch with apprehension as Noya rifles through the planters in the backyard of a small house right on the city’s outskirts.

“It’s my buddy Raphael’s place,” Noya mumbles from deep within a scraggly, prickly shrub, greyish twigs and sun-bleached leaves scraping his bare arms and catching in his hair. “I met him when I had my work permit in Amsterdam—he ran the French tours, I did the Japanese. I told him we were doing the Riviera and he said we could crash at his place if we looked after his snake. He’s in, uh, I think it was Madrid, just for the weekend, going to some concert. Geez, where’s his damn key…”

“His what,” says Asahi.

“His key, he said he was gonna leave it in the—”

“Not the key. Um. Before that. About the, um, the…”

Noya extricates himself from the shrub with only a mild amount of cursing for the sole purpose of shooting a sly grin at Asahi. “About the _snake_ , Asahi? Is that what you were going to say? You’re not _scared_ , are you?”

The look Asahi gave him is one that says _hey, I’m a pretty chill guy, but you just made me hike eight kilometres along the highway in the blazing sun for basically no reason and then informed me I’d be living with a snake for the next three days, so please consider carefully how far you want to push your luck_.

“Don’t worry, she’s small,” Noya says quickly. Raphael’s snake is a ball python named Mimi. Noya doesn’t know how big ball pythons get, but Raphael showed him a picture of Mimi once and she was barely the length of his forearm. That’s nothing. “And Raphael says he fed her a big rat last week, so we just have to give her water and keep her company and stuff. It’ll be fine. Oh hey, I found the key!”

Raphael’s house is bigger than any place Noya has stayed since he started travelling, (aside from the month he spent doing a workaway on an olive farm in Catalonia, but he was living at the farm with the Catalan couple who owned the place plus their four hyped-up kids, three dogs, and about a million horrible, evil chickens, so Raphel’s house still manages to feel bigger). There’s only one bedroom, and Noya briefly contemplates Ryuu’s oops!-only-one-bed seduction technique, but in the interests of not freaking Asahi the fuck out he throws his backpack down by the couch instead. It’s a nice couch. Not as nice as cuddling up with Asahi, but hey, he’s definitely slept on worse.

“Are you sure?” Asahi asks. “You had the pullout last time—”

“Dude, you wouldn’t even fit on the couch. I don’t mind,” says Noya. He’s trying to surreptitiously look around for the snake. A big reptile tank should be hard to miss, but Raphael’s place is kind of messy, and—ah, okay, over by the table, there’s—oh. Holy shit. Holy _shit_ . The picture he saw of Mimi was _clearly_ not a recent one, because—

“Oh my God,” says Asahi, and backs away a few steps. “I thought you said she was _small?_ ”

“She—uh—it’s just—the glass. Like, distorting things,” Noya says, praying he’s right and knowing he’s wrong. “She’s definitely smaller than me, though! Definitely.”

“You’re not short enough to make that comforting,” says Asahi. Noya is almost flattered. It’s the closest anyone has ever come to calling him tall.

Back when Raphael and Noya used to hang out in Amsterdam, they communicated through the shared medium of terrible English, supplemented with a lot of charades. Raphael taught Noya some French, which sort of stuck, and Noya taught Raphael some Japanese, which didn’t stick at all, and both of them struggled through a microscopic amount of Dutch, which they both agreed was a very bad language, probably cursed. However, Raphael, the jerk, has clearly decided to scrap their regular rules of engagement now that Noya’s on his home turf: the instructions stuck to the fridge are all in French, French written in Raphael’s messy scrawl, just to make translating that much more exciting. Raphael has taken the trouble to write something approximating HI YUU!! across the top of the page in shaky hiragana, though. Aw, that’s nice.

Noya struggles through the list while Asahi continues to stare in alarm at the three-foot (okay, maybe four-foot, _maybe_ ) white-and-yellow snake curled up in her tank. _Caution, l’eau chaud est TRÈS chaud_ —the hot water is really hot, okay, their AirBnB host told him the same thing, everyone in Europe is always obsessed with how dangerously hot their hot water is. Towels are in the hall closet, here’s the Wi-Fi password, give Mimi fresh water, don’t drink my pastis, blah blah blah, that stuff’s all straightforward. _S.T.P. arrose le bougainvillea sur la véranda tous les jours_ —uh, okay, no idea what that means. Probably not important. And finally— _Attention, le couvercle du terrarium est libre donc quelquefois Mimi échappe_ , Noya mouths to himself. _Si elle échappe, ne t’inquiète pas! Cherche entre les coussins du canapé parce qu’elle aime dormir là._ Hmm. Well, okay, so, something about Mimi—and then _canapé_ is like one of those fancy little snack things, right— _coussins_ is probably cousins, so—uh—yeah, he really doesn’t have a clue. Oh well. He’s sure it’s fine.

Noya and Asahi finally get to go out for that nice dinner Noya’s been fantasizing about, a real Riviera 9:00 p.m. dinner on a patio with romantic candles and shit, which feels fancy even if they’re actually just at a pizza place—but Noya’s so exhausted from their stupid hike that Asahi has to keep shaking him awake before he faceplants into his pizza napolitaine, and Asahi looks pretty wiped too, stifling yawn after yawn and eating even slower than usual, while Noya wonders what his chances are of getting kicked out of the restaurant if he crawls under the table and curls up for a nap. When they’re finished they walk right back to Raphael’s place and crash. Noya just has time to think _I’m never gonna be able to sleep with a four-foot ball python staring right at me_ before he’s out.

“So there’s the main beach right in town,” Noya begins the next morning over breakfast, “but Raphael told me”—he pauses to wait for Asahi to finish sneezing—“Raphael told me there’s a beach closer to us that’s”—Asahi starts sneezing again—“that’s less crowded, and—dude. You’re sick. Face it.”

“I’m not,” Asahi insists. He pushes his glasses up to rub at his eyes, which are all red, like he’s been crying. God, Noya hopes he hasn’t been crying. The trip hasn’t been that bad, has it? Okay, the last half of yesterday was pretty bad, perhaps even genuinely terrible, and there was the incident with the boar the day before that, but—“I think I’m allergic to something.”

Alright, so he hasn’t been crying. Phew. Allergies. That’s all. He’s not totally miserable and counting down the minutes till he gets to go home. Or if he is, he’s polite enough to pretend otherwise. “The guy I stayed with in Toulouse had really bad hayfever,” Noya says. “There’s probably a bunch of pollen here from stuff that doesn’t grow back home.”

So they go on a lovely romantic walk through the picturesque town of Èze in search of a pharmacy, where Asahi buys allergy medication and Noya buys more Band-Aids, just in case. Asahi stops sniffling so much after, though, so that’s nice.

“Just to be clear, we’re _not_ lost,” Noya says about an hour later, as they’re wandering up a trail that winds along the edge of the cliffs. He adjusts the weight of his backpack over his shoulders, hoping the mille-feuille he bought at the patisserie in town isn’t too badly squashed by now.

“I didn’t say anything,” Asahi says innocently. If they _were_ lost—which, as previously stated, they’re _not_ —but if they _were_ —which they’re obviously not, of course— _but if they were_ , Noya would hold Asahi personally accountable, because he made the brazen decision to _wear his hair down today, what the actual hell._ When they were in high school, he only _ever_ wore his hair down at night during training camps, never just casually, never swept about in a Mediterranean breeze and all shiny in the Côte d’Azur sun, never loose down his back like the hunky guys on the covers of those weird sexy-looking books that always seem to be collecting dust on the shelves in European hostel lounges. Asahi with his hair down looks a little softer, a little less like he just killed a man with his bare hands. He looks really good. Noya desperately wants to run his hands through Asahi’s hair, or pull it, or braid it (he doesn’t know how to braid hair, but whatever), or _something_. He’s distracted. It’s not _his_ fault.

“We’re not lost,” Noya reiterates, “because the beach is right there. We’re exactly where we want to be.”

“Right,” says Asahi. “Sort of a hundred feet too high, but I guess that doesn’t matter too much.”

Noya groans and smacks his palm against his forehead. “Gah, I messed up again! We should’ve just gone to the main beach!”

“Ah, no, no, it’s fine,” Asahi says hurriedly. “It was a nice walk! I liked it!”

“Is there at least a beach down there?” Noya asks. To add an age-old insult to the injury of yet another navigational failure, the grass that grows right along the edge of the cliff is too tall for Noya to see straight down over.

Asahi politely makes zero comments about Noya’s height and leans forward carefully to take a look. “There is, yeah, and there are some people… there are… oh… oh wow…” He claps a hand over his mouth.

“What?” Noya demands. He hops up and down, trying to see over the grass, but the beach must be too narrow; all he can see is ocean. “What is it, what is it?”

Asahi tears himself away and looks at Noya, his face blank with shock. “Um. It’s just that. There are, like, twenty naked men down there.”

“ _What?_ ” says Noya. He laughs and pokes Asahi in the ribs. “Dude, there are _not!_ You need new glasses!”

“I don’t! I just got these ones!”

“Let me see!”

Asahi sighs, but he crouches down so Noya can climb on his back, which kind of makes Noya feel like a five-year-old, but also means he gets to cling to Asahi, whose back is all firm and muscly and just a little bit sweaty, in a very exciting way, so net positive. Noya manages to tear himself away from the wild excitement of having his thighs clamped around Asahi’s hips and looks down. There’s the beach, just a narrow, rocky strip running along the bottom of the cliff in either direction, disappearing into a rocky point in the direction of town where the cliff juts out; there are—oh, are those stairs back there? Maybe they can get down after all; but, more importantly, right down below are, yes, about twenty or thirty naked men, definitely _fully_ naked.

“Holy shit,” mutters Noya. Most of the guys look older, in their thirties or forties. It’s like being at an onsen except that they’re all just… _there_ … on the beach… in the middle of the day… naked. Some of them are swimming, but a lot of them are just hanging out, sunbathing on towels or standing around talking. One dude is eating a sandwich. There are a couple of bottles of wine going around. _What._

“Is that… allowed?” asks Asahi.

“I guess so?” says Noya, still staring. He has a sudden memory of a bunch of English tourists in Salzburg talking about France’s _naturist beaches_. He’d assumed at the time that naturists were people who were really into nature, like bird-watchers and stuff. Now he’s revisiting that theory with a new hypothesis. The tourists had been men _and_ women, though, talking like they’d all hung out together. “How come there aren’t any girls? Hey, don’t give me that look, it was a serious question!”

“If I was a girl, I don’t think I’d want to hang around that many naked guys,” Asahi says, which is probably fair, but also this is Asahi talking.

“Yeah, but you’re a guy and you _still_ wouldn’t want to hang around that many naked guys,” Noya points out. In high school Asahi only ever bathed with Daichi and Suga at training camps, and he was always the quickest at getting dressed, changing from his uniform to his practice clothes so fast Noya hardly ever got a glimpse of anything exciting. In retrospect, it probably didn’t help Asahi’s shyness to look like a dude in his mid-twenties while the rest of the guys on the team were still moving through various stages of teenage gangliness, but still.

“I wouldn’t mind!” Asahi protests. He drops his hands from under Noya’s thighs, and reluctantly Noya lets go of his shoulders and slides off his back.

“Oh yeah? Well, the stairs are just back there. You wanna head down now? Mingle a little? Make some new friends?”

Asahi crosses his arms. He stares down at Noya defiantly, the effect ruined somewhat when the wind whips his hair into his face. “Yeah, maybe I do.”

“Fine, then let’s do it,” says Noya.

“Alright,” says Asahi,

“Let’s go down there right now.”

“Great. Lead the way.”

“No, no, after you.”

“Okay. Sure. Yeah. Let’s go.”

“Yeah, let’s go. Wait—do you have to get naked up here first, or…?”

Asahi looks at Noya. Noya looks at Asahi. Asahi cracks first, doubling over with laughter, which makes Noya cackle until he can’t breathe.

In the end—when they’re able to look at each other without losing it again—they _do_ take the stairs down, although once they’re at the beach they head away from the conclave of naked dudes, opting instead to scramble along the rocks until they find a stretch of beach that’s wide enough for them to put their towels down. A couple of other people are hanging out at this part of the beach (not butt-naked, as far as Noya can tell), but they’re far enough out from the main beach that it’s pretty quiet. Noya tries to eat his mille-feuille, but struggles, partly because the pastry keeps breaking but mostly because it turns out that watching Asahi unbutton his shirt and slide it off his shoulders takes up one-hundred-and-twenty percent of Noya’s brain capacity.

Noya manages to gather the coherency to pull off his own shirt, while Asahi takes off his glasses and ties his hair up again, until he looks just like he did in high school. Well— _almost_ like he looked in high school…

Noya pokes Asahi’s stomach and says, “Asahi, you’re getting squishy!”

Asahi slaps Noya’s hand away and tries to hike his swim trunks up higher. He doesn’t say anything, but his face is steadily flushing pink. Oops.

“Hey, it’s not a bad thing!” Noya insists. “It’s cute!”

Pink kaleidoscopes into something approaching maroon. Asahi stares at him. “Um, what?”

Double oops. He didn’t mean to say that out loud. Oh well, it’s out there now. Noya looks Asahi right in the face and says, “I said what I said. Hey, race you to the water!”

“Wait—” says Asahi, but Noya’s already slipping in the fine gravel that makes up the beach as he sprints for the ocean.

ISTANBUL, TURKEY, 2014

There are a lot of advantages to travelling solo. Noya gets to eat wherever he wants. He gets to skip whatever museums look boring, which, to be honest, is most of them. He gets to walk all the way across various cities instead of taking the bus, for no particular reason other than he likes walking, without someone beside him whining about getting tired or having blisters. He gets to arrive in Geneva, look around, decide _you know what, I’m not feeling this_ and just leave right away. Lots of advantages, _lots_.

But.

Sometimes there are some disadvantages, too.

He takes the train to Istanbul for a workaway at a B&B in the city, mostly fixing stuff up around the building and helping out with the English-speaking guests at the front desk. Istanbul is awesome, _but…_

The hosts are nice but barely speak English. The guests are friendly but mostly middle-aged. The city is wicked cool but hellish to navigate, leaving Noya wandering around lost all the damn time, trying not to panic as his phone teeters on the brink of dying. Between the time difference and their respective work schedules, Noya and Ryuu aren’t getting to talk all that much; Ennoshita, Kinoshita, and Narita are all busy with university; Shouyou is volleyball-crazy as usual, spending all his time at practice with the team or at after-practice practice with Kageyama. And getting jostled by strangers on the packed Istanbul Metro is somehow not the same as dogpiling with all his teammates or wrestling with Ryuu for the last meat bun at Sakanoshita until Coach Ukai kicks them out.

Noya tells himself he’s still having a good time, though—and he is, honest. Istanbul is exciting. The food is amazing. The city is crowded and bright and overwhelming, and there’s always something to do, even if that something is just trying to get himself un-lost for the twentieth time that day. But by chance one day, when he’s trying to find his way back to the B&B and wondering once again where the hell he made a wrong turn _this_ time, he passes what appears to be the only East Asian grocery in the entire damn city; and he goes in just for fun, and stops in front of a display of almond fish, and finds himself blinking back tears, which is stupid, because he doesn’t even _like_ almond fish that much. They’re his last-resort snack. He’s on the verge of sobbing in the aisle of a grocery store over his last-resort snack. That’s when he finally realizes _holy shit, I’m so homesick_.

He buys the almond fish, so he can eat them and remember why he never liked them that much, and he buys a pack of ramune candy, because he’s not a total masochist. Then he finds his way back to the B&B. His hosts have given him their adult daughter’s old bedroom, so he slinks in, shuts the door, and sits on the floor, sniffling a little, eating his almond fish, thinking _yeah I really don’t like these that much, so why the hell are they making me cry_? He scrolls through his phone. It’s around 8:00 p.m. in Japan right now: Ryuu’s been working evening shifts at the gym lately; Shouyou’s probably biking home from school. He could call his grandpa, but his grandpa’s hearing isn’t so good these days. He calls Asahi instead. They’ve only talked on the phone a couple of times at this point, but every time Noya calls him Asahi picks up right away, and all Noya really wants right now is the guarantee of a familiar voice.

“Hello?” says Asahi.

“Hey!” says Noya. He sniffles. Rubs his eyes a bit. Eats another almond fish. Thinks _why did I buy these_? “Asahi-san! What’s up?”

“Oh, um, I’m just folding my laundry,” says Asahi, sounding slightly apologetic, like he would have picked a more exciting activity for the evening if he’d known Noya was going to call and demand a report.

“Cool. That’s cool,” says Noya, and sniffles again. He wants to be home in Japan so bad right now. He wants to eat dinner with his grandpa and go to Ryuu’s apartment and swing by Karasuno to join in after-school practice with Shouyou. He knows it’ll pass soon enough—he never stays sad for long, and he’s already started looking into getting a job somewhere back in Europe for a while—but right now, in this specific moment, he really, _really_ wants to be home.

“Hey, are you okay?” Asahi asks. “You sound kind of…”

“Yeah! Yeah. I’m fine! I got Indian for lunch,” Noya lies. “The curry’s really spicy, it’s making my nose run.”

“Oh, okay,” says Asahi. “So… um… how’s… um… where are you right now?”

“Istanbul! It’s good. I almost got mugged yesterday!”

“Oh my God,” says Asahi. “You what? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I said _almost_ , Asahi-san! Well,” Noya says, considering the semantics, “I guess I _did_ get mugged, but all I had on me was my transit card, and it had, like, half a fare left on it anyway. The guys were nice about it. So, y’know, no big deal.”

“Oh… good… I guess…” Asahi says weakly.

“How’s work?” Noya asks. Asahi always acts like his work is nothing special, but Noya’s never worked at an office before—or a studio, whatever, Asahi seems to do a bit of both—and he’s never had coworker drama. Hearing about it all second-hand from Asahi is like watching a TV show—the kind of TV show with fewer fight scenes than Noya usually watches, sure, but still, it’s pretty exciting.

“Um, yeah, it’s fine,” says Asahi. “I mean, just the usual. You know.”

“C’mon, Asahi-san, give me the details! Are Aika-san and Hiroto-san still at war over lapel styles? Did Miyu-san steal your pinking shears again? Is Saika-san finally going to dump her boyfriend?”

“She dumped him last week. She’s seeing a guy from our accounting team now,” says Asahi. “You can, um, you can just call me Asahi, by the way. I’m not that much older than you.”

“Oh, okay, sure! Wait, so she’s seeing a new guy already?”

“Yeah, well, ah, I think she may have been… um… sort of seeing him, you know, _before_ she dumped the boyfriend…”

“Whoa, no way! That’s so bad!” Weirdly, though, hearing Asahi talk about his coworker cheating on her deadbeat boyfriend with an accountant has already made Noya feel better. He doesn’t know what that says about him as a person. Probably nothing good.

They talk for a bit longer, until Noya has to go help his hosts with some repainting. “Hey Asahi, you should come traveling with me sometime,” Noya says before he ends the call, just throwing the suggestion out there. “You have a real job now, so you can take a real vacation!”

“Oh, um, yeah, maybe sometime,” says Asahi. It’s not a _yes_. It’s barely even a lukewarm _maybe_. But the thing is, the thing _is,_ it’s also not an outright _no_.


	3. Chapter 3

ÈZE, FRANCE, 2015

“Oh my God, Asahi, Asahi, listen to _this,_ ” says Noya as he sprints into Raphael’s kitchen from out on the back deck. His socks slip on the tiles and he grabs Asahi around the waist to stop himself from sliding right across the room and into the hall. Asahi, to his credit, only flinches in surprise a little, and manages to keep a steady grip on the knife he’s using to chop onions for dinner without cutting any of his fingers off. “Oops! Sorry! You good? Okay, okay, are you ready? So y’know that beach with all the naked dudes? Apparently it’s a _nude gay beach_. Èze is, like, famous for it! It’s all over the internet!”

Noya just waves his phone in front of Asahi’s face to illustrate. Asahi looks at his screen for a few seconds, then turns his attention back to the onions. “Oh. Um. I guess that makes sense,” he says.

“Isn’t that wild?” says Noya, scrolling through a couple more search results on his phone. “I didn’t know they had stuff like that! Hey, but where do all the gay ladies go? D’you think they have their own beach? Or maybe they do something else. What do lesbians like to do?”

“Other lesbians, I’ve heard,” says Asahi.

“Huh? Other—holy shit,” says Noya, and laughs in amazement. His arm is still looped around Asahi’s waist, so he pinches him in the side, making him twitch again. “ _Asahi_ , did you just make a _dirty joke_?”

“It wasn’t that dirty!” Asahi protests, but he’s grinning.

In a very casual, subtle way, because they just so happen to be on the subject anyway, obviously not with any ulterior motive in mind whatsoever, Noya says, “Hey, would you ever date a guy? I’d totally date a guy. What about you?”

“Oh, you, um, you would? Um, so you’re… I didn’t… um, I didn’t know that…”

“Yeah, so anyway, what about you?” Noya presses. Reminding himself to Chill Out and not be too pushy, he adds quickly, “Or you don’t have to tell me. That’s fine too. Just curious, but—”

“I would,” says Asahi. “I mean, I have. So. Yeah.”

Noya feels like Asahi has just reached over and socked him right in the gut. “You _have_? What? I didn’t know that! Who? I can’t believe you never told me! Are you dating right now?”

“No, no! Ah, it wasn’t really a big deal,” mumbles Asahi. He reaches up and rubs his forearm over his eyes, which are watering again, either from the onions or because he’s due for another dose of his allergy medication, but hopefully not because he’s still pining wistfully over the mystery ex-boyfriend Noya didn’t even know existed until thirty seconds ago. “He was in Daichi’s program at university. Well, I guess he still is. Um. We went out for a couple of months, but… he was actually kind of, um, kind of not that nice… so…”

“So you dumped him? Wow! That’s cold, Asahi! I bet he deserved it, though.”

“I didn’t dump him! It was mutual,” Asahi insists. Noya has learned from experience that usually when people say this, it means they were brutally dumped themselves, but he thinks in Asahi’s case it probably means the exact opposite. He also thinks Asahi would have felt way worse about dumping the mystery ex-boyfriend than the mystery ex-boyfriend could possibly feel about getting dumped, though, which is saying something, since the mystery ex-boyfriend now has to live with the fact that he _got dumped by Azumane Asahi_ , who is easily the coolest, most handsomest guy in all of Japan, in Noya’s professional opinion.

“Uh huh,” says Noya. “Did he cry when you dumped him? I bet he cried. I totally would’ve cried. Wait, did you guys have sex?”

The knife slides worryingly close to the tip of Asahi’s thumb once again, and a piece of onion goes flying. “Noya!” says Asahi, looking mortified.

“I didn’t mean _while you were dumping him_ , duh,” says Noya, rolling his eyes. “Just, like, in general. Did you?”

Asahi glances down at him, his face scarlet, and then looks away again quickly. He jerks his head once, in the tiniest approximation of a nod, as if hoping to sneak the admission by Noya without him noticing. Oh, sweet. That means Asahi knows what he’s doing, which makes one of them. Noya was vaguely concerned about that. He personally has developed an exceptional talent for making out with hot strangers at bars but hasn’t really made it past that. Between his breadth of experience and Asahi’s depth (haha, _depth_ ) of experience, they’ve totally got this covered.

“You look like you’re planning something,” Asahi says nervously.

 _Yeah, planning to have you nail me against Raphael’s weirdly firm mattress_ , is what Noya thinks but does not say, because he’s finally starting to get a handle on this whole _subtlety_ thing. Instead, he drops his arm from around Asahi’s waist and leans back against the counter in a position carefully calculated to look relaxed and chill while also showing off the fact that the two months he spent helping to rebuild a barn at that Catalan olive farm went right to his biceps. 

Asahi glances at him again. Is he checking Noya out? He sort of looks like he’s staring at Noya’s nipple piercing again, which stands out under his t-shirt. That seems promising. But is Asahi thinking something along the lines of _that piercing is so hot, I really want to nail him against Raphael’s weirdly firm mattress_ or is it more like _I can’t believe I’m friends with a moron whose Polish is so shitty he went to get his ear pierced and came back with a ring right through one nipple, who the fuck does that?_

“Hey, don’t worry, I told you already I never plan anything,” Noya reassures him, flashing his most charming and innocent smile for good measure. “So what was your mystery man like? Was he hot? Do you, like, have a type?” He thinks _please say loud and short, please say loud and short, PLEASE SAY LOUD AND SHORT, come on, Asahi, give me something to work with—_

“Um. Well. Not really,” says Asahi. He brushes his hair back behind one ear. He put it up to swim, but it got wet anyway, and the salty ocean water made it dry in beautiful waves, even if Asahi keeps groaning about what a pain it’ll be to brush out. Asahi puts down the knife, the diced onion sitting forgotten on Raphael’s cheap plastic cutting board while the oil heating in the pan on the stove starts to sizzle. He twists his hands together, then clenches one fist and lets his fingers relax, the way he used to do in games to make himself calm down before he served. Then he looks right at Noya, a little shyly, maybe, and Noya thinks _oh my God, is this happening?_ “And, um, there’s not that much to say about him. I’ve sort of, um. Moved on, I guess.”

“Moved on,” Noya repeats. He pushes himself off the counter and steps in closer, taking Asahi’s hand and lacing their fingers together. His heart is racing like he just shotgunned a couple of energy drinks, which, for the record, is actually _not_ a good way to recover from jetlag, as he learned the hard way. “Yeah. Me too.”

“Oh,” says Asahi. “Um, were you—I didn’t realize—were you seeing someone, or…”

“Huh? No,” says Noya. He both loves and hates the fact that Asahi is a whole foot taller than him. Is Asahi going to bend down and kiss him, or does Noya have to climb up on the counter and take initiative himself? He compromises by grabbing Asahi’s shirt so he can pull him down and—

“Um, where’s Mimi?” says Asahi, suddenly freezing up.

“Who?” says Noya.

To Noya’s dismay, Asahi straightens up again, the buzzing electric we’re-about-to-kiss-oh-my-god- _finally_ charge dissipating just as quickly as the colour is draining from Asahi’s face. “Isn’t that her name? The snake?”

“What snake?” says Noya. His brain is still coming back online.

“ _The snake_ ,” Asahi repeats. “The snake we’re supposed to be looking after? That snake?”

Oh yeah, right, sure, _that_ snake. “Well, she’s,” Noya begins, turning around to point in the vague direction of the terrarium where Mimi was curled up basking under her heat lamp when they left that morning. He’s willing to take a moment to soothe Asahi’s reptile-frazzled nerves if it means they can get right back to the part where they were just about to kiss.

Then Noya freezes too, because Mimi is not basking under her heat lamp. Nor is she wrapped around her log, nor is there any sign of her white-and-yellow scales poking out of her den. And now that Noya’s looking closely, the lid is sitting kind of funny on the tank, actually. Was it like that before? It was, wasn’t it? It was definitely like that before. Was it?

“She’s just hiding under her rock,” Noya insists.

“She’s four feet long! She doesn’t fit under the rock!”

“I’d say closer to three feet, really—”

“Noya!”

“Okay, okay, calm down,” says Noya, trying and failing to follow his own advice. “She’s probably just buried in the mulch. Look, I’ll check.”

Noya marches up to the tank, pushes the lid to the side, takes a deep breath, and plunges his hand into the mulch. He’s bracing to feel a slippery, scaly body underneath, but all he feels is the odd damp-dry texture of the chunky mulch, which on the one hand is a relief, but on the other hand is deeply horrifying. Mimi is not buried in the mulch. She is not under the rock. She is not in her den. The lid on the tank was sitting funny because she pushed the damn thing off and slithered out and is now somewhere loose in the house, presumably lurking in wait so she can leap out and—and—are ball pythons venomous? They’re not, right? He’s pretty sure they’re not. Raph would have said, right? He pulls out his phone and does a quick and very surreptitious Google search, in which he learns that ball pythons are not venomous but are constrictors, which means they squeeze their prey to death, which is just something he’s not going to think too hard about right now.

“So, potentially some bad news on the snake front,” says Noya.

Asahi takes this remarkably well. He just nods grimly and gets down on his knees to check under the couch while Noya ransacks all of Raphael’s cupboards. At first they’re both buzzing with the terror of actually _finding_ her—Noya’s pulse skyrockets every time he sticks his hand behind the fridge or under the bed or in the linen closet, deeply nervous about the prospect of touching snake instead of bedsheets, and Asahi seems jumpier than usual as well. After a while, though, that morphs into a different kind of panic. They’ve searched the whole house twice over, with one brief intermission when the oil in the pan on the stove started smoking because they’d both forgotten the burner was still on. It’s not a big house. A yellow four-foot snake should not be difficult to find. Mimi is just… gone.

“Raph’s gonna _murder_ me,” Noya groans, throwing himself down on the couch. They’ve checked around the back deck and outside the front door, but if she’s made it outside, Noya can’t help thinking she’s probably long gone, headed off into the wilderness to terrorize the local rat population and scare the shit out of tourists. “He _loves_ that snake. She’s like his little snakey baby. He’ll be _devastated_.”

“She might still turn up,” Asahi says half-heartedly. He sits down beside Noya. “Maybe there’s somewhere we didn’t look, or…”

“Face it, Asahi, she’s gone. I’m the worst snake babysitter in the world! I swear I put the lid on properly when I refilled her water this morning!”

“My sister’s cat got out once, and he managed to make it home a few days later,” Asahi offers. “So, maybe…”

“Right, see, the difference is, that was a cat, and this is a snake,” says Noya. “Wait, do snakes have a good sense of direction? Are they the ones that do that homing thing?”

“That’s pigeons, I think,” says Asahi.

“Ugh. Yeah, you’re right. Which sister?”

“Hmm?”

“Which sister lost her cat? The mean one or the boring one?”

“Oh, um, well, I wouldn’t really call Ayumi _mean_ …”

“It’s okay, Asahi, you can say it.”

“Um. Okay. Well, yeah, it was the mean one,” says Asahi. He sounds a little guilty, but he’s still grinning. He glances sideways at Noya, then looks away again, rubbing the back of his neck. “You could come meet them, whenever you’re back in Japan. If you wanted.”

Noya stares at him. “Like, meet your family?”

“Yeah, um, I mean if you don’t want to, that’s not, um… it’s just an idea, so—”

“Yeah!” Noya says quickly. “Yeah, that would be awesome! Hey, wait, this isn’t just ‘cause you want me to kick Ayumi’s butt for putting a worm in your soup that one time, is it?”

“No, no! But, I mean, if that were to happen… well…”

“Ha! I knew it! You act all sweet, but you’re just as much of a jerk as me deep down, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think you’re a jerk,” says Asahi. He looks at Noya again, and this time doesn’t look away. “I think you’re really nice.”

Never let it be said that Noya doesn’t know how to read the room. He scrambles up onto his knees so fast Asahi looks slightly taken aback, and he cups the back of Asahi’s head, where his hair is crinkly from the salt water, and Asahi puts a hand tentatively on Noya’s thigh, and Noya leans in, and Asahi leans in, and—

—and Asahi goes rigid. Not in a sexy way, more in a rigor mortis kind of way. He stares at Noya and says, in a forcedly calm tone indicating that the full extent of his brain capacity is being channeled into not panicking right now, “Um, so, I think I found her.”

“What?” says Noya.

“Mimi,” says Asahi. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I’m sitting on her. I can feel her moving under the cushion.”

“Oh shit,” says Noya, which about sums up the situation.

They both slide off the couch and onto the floor just in time to see Mimi’s head poking up from between the couch cushions, underneath which she has apparently chosen to curl up for a nap. Her expression is difficult to read, primarily due to the fact that she’s a snake, but Noya thinks the way she flicks her tongue at them suggests a mild sense of offense at being sat on.

“Should we… pick her up…?” Asahi asks, backing away as she slithers out from under the cushion and onto the floor.

“Yep. Yep. We should definitely do that,” says Noya, making no move to grab her.

“Um… so, how…?”

“I have no idea. Shit. Uh, okay, you keep an eye on her for a sec,” says Noya, and pulls up the first snake-handling tutorial he can find on YouTube.

While Asahi watches from a safe distance, Noya strokes Mimi’s sides to get her comfortable with him, then gently grasps her around the middle and picks her up. She twists around his wrist, peering at him curiously. She feels kind of cool, actually, the way her scales slide over his skin, although that doesn’t stop his heart from racing so fast he feels kind of lightheaded.

“Wanna try?” Noya says, holding her out to Asahi, who shakes his head in a vehement _no way in hell, thanks_. “Oh, c’mon! She’s really nice, see? Don’t hurt her feelings!”

“Um. Well. Just for a second,” Asahi says. He reaches out slowly, and Mimi coils herself around his hand. To his credit, he doesn’t freak out, although he does look about as far from relaxed as Noya has ever seen him. Noya capitalizes on the opportunity by whipping out his phone and taking a picture, since he has a feeling that seeing Asahi handling a four-foot snake is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event. Then they tuck her back into her tank, both of them taking turns to double- and then triple-check the lid to make sure it’s on properly while Mimi blinks at them innocently. She’s probably already planning her next jailbreak.

Noya’s kind of hoping that they’ll pick up things where they left off on the couch after that, but his stomach growls in a pointed way that reminds him they were planning on eating dinner two whole hours ago. So they finally make dinner, and they eat outside on the patio in the dark, and then the heat of the day catches up with them, enhanced by the ebbing adrenaline rush of the Great Snake Hunt of 2014, so they go to bed. Noya gives Mimi a dirty look as he settles on the couch, but she does look kind of cute curled around her log, so he can’t really bring himself to feel too resentful.

ÈZE, FRANCE, 2015

 **Noya:** dude so i almost fell off a cliff hiking today but asahi grabbed me

 **Ryuu:** you what

 **Noya:** i totally felt his pecs it was super hot

 **Ryuu:** wait you fell off a cliff again?

 **Noya:** hes so strong and could totally crush me but he wont cause hes such a softie but also hes so strong and could totally crush me… ryuu its so hot…

 **Ryuu:** okay can we go back to the part where you fell off a cliff for a second

 **Noya:** fine but i think ur missing the point here

CANNES, FRANCE, 2015

“It’s the same collection that’s sold in Tokyo, but they style some of the pieces a little differently,” Asahi says thoughtfully as they stand in front of the Chanel store along the Boulevard de la Croisette in Cannes. “I guess for the French market. That’s interesting.”

“Uh huh,” says Noya. He clenches his popsicle stick between his teeth, hoping to suck off a few lingering molecules of lemon-violet, but all he tastes is damp wood.

“I don’t really do women’s clothing right now, but I’m trying to branch out,” says Asahi. “And Chanel uses some more masculine design elements. Like the collar on that suit, see… oh, and the shoulders on that jacket, that’s nice… I don’t really like the silhouette on those dresses, though, I mean the concept is interesting, but it seems a little _too_ boxy, especially with the waist cinched in like that…”

“Yep,” says Noya. Oh God, he’s never been so bored in his life. He never thought he’d care about high-end women’s fashion, and as it turns out, he was one-hundred-percent right. It’s all just a bunch of fancy office clothes. There was one store that had a big picture of a lady in a mostly see-through dress, which was kind of exciting, but Asahi just walked right past it without giving it a second glance. Noya’s glad that Asahi’s having fun nerding out, but holy shit, he’s so bored he’s going to die.

“Oh, sorry,” Asahi says, glancing at him guiltily. “Am I taking too long? We can go do something else…”

“No, no, this is cool! Tell me about the, uh, inseams, or whatever,” Noya insists, against his every survival instinct. He figures this is the very least he owes Asahi, after all the weird shit he’s put him through already, but _man_ , does it come at a high price. Cannes seems hotter than the rest of the Côte d’Azur, like the breeze coming off the water hits all the bougie designer stores along the Boulevard and stops dead, embarrassed to be outclassed. Noya just wants to get out of his gross, sweaty clothes and go to the beach.

“Actually, I’m pretty ready to swim,” says Asahi, proving once again that he is, in fact, The Perfect Man.

“Hey, what’s on your arms?” Noya asks as they’re walking down the narrow stone street to the beach, the colourful old buildings with their painted shutters looming over them and providing some blessed shade.

Asahi, who was rubbing his hand over his forearm absently a second ago, stops and glances down, then flinches in surprise. “Oh wow. I don’t know…”

Noya grabs Asahi’s wrist and turns over his arm for a better look at the skin on the inside of his forearm, which is covered in red bumps. “Chicken pox?” Noya guesses, thinking _please no_. Chicken pox is absolutely the last thing Asahi needs on what has already been an overly eventful vacation.

Luckily Asahi shakes his head. “I had it already when I was a kid. Maybe they’re bug bites? They’re itchy.”

“I guess they _kinda_ look like blackfly bites,” Noya says doubtfully. “But how come I don’t have any?” He’s barely even _seen_ a bug since he arrived in Nice. There are so few bugs around here that none of the windows on the Riviera even have screens, a feature that was driven home very vividly when Noya leaned a little too far out the window of their third-floor walkup this afternoon and nearly fell right out.

“I don’t know. Um, my bed’s right by the window here, so maybe… I mean, I didn’t think blackflies were really active at night, but… or mosquitoes, maybe…”

Asahi has at least twenty bites on each arm. “I think we’d know if there were fifty mosquitoes hanging out with us last night,” Noya points out. “Wanna switch beds tonight? The pull-out isn’t bad. It’s a double.”

“We could just share it,” Asahi suggests. “That way you don’t get—”

“ _Okay!_ Okay! I mean, sure. That’s cool. No problem! Fine with me.” He tries to sound as casual and relaxed as Asahi, but he’s pretty sure the fact that he just shouted OKAY! before Asahi had even finished speaking might weigh against him a tiny bit. Oh man, he can’t believe _Asahi_ just pulled the only-one-bed trick on _him_! Sure, there were extenuating circumstances, but—! And damn, he was so smooth about it! If they don’t at least make out a little tonight, Noya will be forced to conclude that he has the least game of any human being in the history of the known universe. He’ll just retire from flirtation altogether and go to live at one of these European monasteries, like maybe that one he visited in Italy where the nuns used to put the bodies of all their dead sisters in a special room to mummify and then they hung out with the oozing corpses all day while they prayed. That sounds pretty neat, if also liable to run into some health-and-safety issues.

So that night, after they’ve gone to the beach, and split most of a bottle of wine between them sitting on the hill in Croix des Gardes, and wandered back slightly drunk through the streets of Le Suquet to the apartment they’re renting, Noya showers thoroughly to make sure he doesn’t smell like three-day-old roadkill, brushes his teeth twice for similar reasons, and then gets into bed. He scrolls through his phone more or less at random, pretending to be totally absorbed by old messages from Ryuu and Shouyou until the aging mattress dips and creaks and suddenly he’s in bed, actually _in bed_ , with Asahi.

Noya rolls onto his back so he can sneak the occasional glance at Asahi beside him. Asahi has his hair down again, and he’s wearing an old t-shirt that’s fraying at the shoulder-seams. He has his book, the same one he takes to the beach every day so he can read after he’s done swimming while Noya burns off the rest of his energy chasing seagulls up and down the shore. To Noya’s great disappointment, Asahi opens the book now and starts to read. Noya, his brain now too overexcited to comprehend written language, closes his messages and opens Instagram instead. Raph has posted a picture of the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid. That’s cool. Maybe Noya should go to Madrid. Asahi is in bed right beside him. And Ryuu posted a cute picture of Kiyoko at the park, looking stunningly beautiful with all the spring flowers blooming around her. Asahi is in bed right beside him. Oh, the Australians from Antwerp are posting pictures from back home in Perth. Huh, Perth looks cool too. _Asahi is in bed right beside him_ —

“Can I turn the light out?” asks Asahi.

“Yep. Yeah. Sure,” says Noya. He puts his phone down on the floor and flops over onto his stomach, mashing his face into the pillow and fighting back the urge to scream in frustration as the light clicks off and the room goes dark. _How_ is he so _bad_ at this? Should he have brushed his teeth a third time? Should he drop a hint? Is there a more subtle and less desperate way to put out an I’m-into-you vibe than grabbing Asahi’s face and tenderly shouting at him _I have a MASSIVE crush on you, PLEASE have sex with me_? Probably, but Noya can’t think of it right now—

The mattress creaks as Asahi shifts. Noya can hear him breathing. He’s probably tired, Noya tells himself, trying to calm down. They spent all day out in the sun walking around, and then they had all that wine, and of course there was all that excitement over the turned pleats or whatever the hell had Asahi so crazy pumped at the Valentino store during their lethally boring designer marathon. Noya can be mature about this. Maybe. Sort of.

“Hey, Noya?” Asahi says.

Noya rolls over and finds Asahi facing him, looking right at him, his hair fanned out dark on the pillow, illuminated by the sliver of moonlight coming in through the gap in the old shutters. “Yeah?” Noya manages. He might be on the verge of cardiac arrest. There’s a definite possibility.

“Are you… I mean, I guess, are you okay out here?”

Okay, not where he was expecting that to go. “Huh?” says Noya. “Like, in Cannes? Look, _I’m_ not the one attracting every bug in the Mediterranean, y’know?”

Asahi laughs. “No, I mean… just, out here, in general. By yourself. Don’t you get lonely?”

“Oh. Uh. Well, I usually stay at hostels or with workaway hosts, or I get a work permit and find a job or whatever. I meet tons of people.”

“But… you don’t ever miss Miyagi?”

“Sure I do,” says Noya, surprised. How could he not? That’s where his grandpa is, and most of his high school friends, and he misses the food and the familiar streets and the way the air smells and how he knows his grandpa’s house so well he could navigate it with his eyes closed if he had to. “I miss it all the time. But I like being out here, too.”

Asahi doesn’t say anything for a moment, just looks at Noya. “I really missed Miyagi when I first moved to Tokyo. I still really miss it.”

“Oh yeah?” says Noya. This surprises him too. Tokyo isn’t that far from Miyagi at all. Asahi could go home every weekend if he wanted.

Asahi nods. “I miss Daichi and Suga. And my family—”

“What, even the mean sister?”

“Ha. Yeah. Even her. Um. I know it’s silly, but—”

“It’s not silly!” Noya insists, because it’s not. Maybe it’s different when you’re moving to a new city for good, even if that city’s only a couple of hours from Miyagi. Noya gets through being homesick by telling himself he can book a flight back to Japan any damn time he wants, which reassures him enough that he never actually ends up doing it—but Asahi’s job keeps him stuck in Tokyo, and on top of that his two best friends are off doing their usual conjoined-twins act at university together, probably seeing each other every day without him. Maybe _that’s_ why Asahi always picks up whenever Noya calls.

“You are coming back to Japan, right?” says Asahi. “Eventually?”

“ _Yeah_ , duh! I’ll fly right into Tokyo and visit you first. Too bad if you don’t want me, I’m coming anyway.”

“I do want you,” Asahi says quickly. “Um—or—what I meant was—”

Noya snickers and props himself up on his elbows. “Oh _Asahi-san_ , you _want_ me, huh?”

Asahi gives him an exasperated look. Noya grins back. Then, before he can lose his nerve, optimistic about his chances of success given the absence of any escaped ball pythons this time, Noya lunges forward and kisses him.

The enthusiasm with which Asahi grabs him around the waist and kisses him back makes him suspect that maybe Asahi was trying to figure out how to work up to this too. But Noya doesn’t waste too much time thinking about that, because wow, _he’s kissing Asahi_. Sixteen-year-old Noya would be losing his mind. Nineteen-year-old Noya is currently losing his mind. Finally he gets to dig his fingers into Asahi’s nice hair, pulling just a tiny bit, not enough to hurt him, and Asahi adjusts his grip around Noya’s waist, so that his hand is resting just under Noya’s shirt above his hip, where he never thought he was particularly sensitive, but where it now feels like every single nerve ending in his body is concentrated, lighting up under Asahi’s fingers like a live circuit-board stuck in a bathtub.

Through the haze of excitement he tells himself _okay Yuu, now be cool about this, be chill, don’t come on too strong_. Then Asahi slides his hand a little further up Noya’s shirt and Noya tells himself _actually fuck that_ and climbs right on top of him, kneeling to straddle Asahi’s hips. “Your hair is so nice,” he mumbles against Asahi’s mouth as he twists his hand through Asahi’s hair and pulls again, “fuck, it’s so nice, I love your hair—”

“Oh, um, thank you,” says Asahi. “Yours is also very, um, _ahh_ , do that again—”

“What, this?”

“Yeah, with your— _ouch_ , no, not—”

“My bad—mm, why do you always smell so good—”

“I, um, well, I shower?” Asahi suggests weakly, as Noya kisses down his neck. “Um, is this—are you—are you okay, you’re kind of trembling—”

He’s right. Noya’s thighs are shaking like he just spent an afternoon running sprints up and down the hill at Karasuno. He feels like he’s on drugs, really cool drugs, like maybe whatever drugs Monaco’s medieval city planners were on when they thought _hey, y’know what would be a really sweet idea, building a city right into this sheer cliff, hell yeah, let’s do it_. “Yeah, I’m good, I’m just like, I’m really into you,” Noya gasps. He disentangles his fingers from Asahi’s hair and slips his hands up the front of Asahi’s shirt instead, feeling the muscles in Asahi’s stomach twitch, running his hands up over the bumps of Asahi’s ribs. He tugs at the hem of the shirt and adds, “Hey, can I take this off? Should I just—yeah, if you just—there, okay—geez, Asahi, how come you’re so big, you’re so _hot_ , it’s not fair—”

“Oh, um, I, well, you’re, I think you’re really, um, you know—”

“Uh huh,” says Noya, more focused on grabbing Asahi’s hand and guiding it further up his chest, placing it pointedly right around the nipple ring area.

“Can I, uh…”

“Yeah, normally I sorta twist it, yeah, like that, you can do it harder—” Asahi’s fingers tug more insistently at the piercing and Noya chokes out another gasp, shivery heat spiking all the way down to the pit of his stomach. The piercing suddenly feels worth the six months he spent not being able to sleep on his stomach while it healed, not to mention the nine months he spent nursing a lingering sense of being a certifiable dumbass. He wishes he hadn’t been such a baby about getting the second one done too but there’s no way in hell he’s going through all that again, even if it does leave him feeling kind of lopsided.

Holy shit, he doesn’t think he’s ever gotten this hard this fast in his life. He’s been keyed up all afternoon and now he has Asahi half-naked under him, though, so like, what else did he expect? He’s so hard just feeling his boxers rub against the head of his cock when he shifts positions is almost too much. He lets his shaky thighs give out gently so he can settle right against Asahi and grind down, and Asahi presses a hand to his mouth like he’s trying to be quiet but struggling, and Noya can feel through Asahi’s thin pajama shorts that he’s not quite as hard as Noya but getting there, which is, holy shit, which is _so hot_ , this is absolutely the hottest thing that’s ever happened to him, here’s hoping he doesn’t embarrass himself by coming in, like, the next thirty seconds—

He pushes Asahi’s hand away from his mouth so he can lean in and kiss him again, messy and desperate, Asahi’s stubble scratchy against his face, his hands clutching at Noya’s back, pulling him in closer. Noya can barely even focus enough to kiss properly, not now that he’s found the right angle to let his cock drag against Asahi’s every time he shifts his hips, so he just sort of ends up panting into Asahi’s mouth instead, although Asahi’s eyes are closed and his head is tilted back against the pillow anyway, so he doesn’t seem to care. “I had such a big crush on you in high school,” Noya gasps, grinding down harder, dragging his fingers through Asahi’s nice hair again, running his hands down Asahi’s amazing muscles, “like such a _massive_ crush, I thought you were so hot, you were, like, the reason I realized I was bisexual—”

Asahi’s eyes flutter open again for a second and he stares at Noya dazedly. “Oh, um, sorry…”

Noya buries his nose in the hollow under Asahi’s jaw, where his skin is damp with sweat, and mumbles, “Asahi, I had such a _stupid big_ crush on you that I nearly failed social studies—”

“I’m really sorry,” says Asahi.

Noya pauses for a second and heaves himself up so he can look Asahi in the face. “Dude, stop apologizing.”

“Sorry,” says Asahi, “wait, I mean—”

Noya takes pity on him and kisses him again to get him to shut up, which has the added benefit of preventing Noya from saying more stupid shit too. He figures it’s in both of their best interests. His fingers scrabble at the elastic of Asahi’s shorts, starting to tug it down over his hips, and Asahi’s hands slip tentatively down the back of Noya’s boxers, and Noya thinks _hell yeah, here we go_ —except Asahi shifts his weight slightly, and the angle changes, and Noya comes almost before he knows what’s happening, the heat coiling in his stomach snapping suddenly, his back arching as he shudders against Asahi. Then the friction is abruptly too much, and he has to slide off Asahi, breathless and kind of lightheaded.

“Um, did you just…” Asahi asks.

“Yeah, oh my God, yeah, wow,” Noya manages. He blinks a couple of times, until the room sort of stops spinning and he can make himself focus on Asahi, who is still very obviously hard. He rests a hand low on Asahi’s stomach, right where the trail of dark hair disappears into his pajamas. “Did you want me to, like—”

“Only if you want to,” Asahi says.“Or I can just, um…”

Noya squints at him. He’s not good with ambiguity and he doesn’t want to fuck this up. “So wait, do you want me to or not? Can you just say what you want, ‘cause—”

“I want you to do it,” Asahi says quickly. The flush from his face is spreading down his neck now. He looks so good. “If you want to—”

“Well _duh_ , obviously _I_ want to,” says Noya. He shifts his weight, winces at the stickiness in his boxers, and wonders idly what his rebound time is as he sticks his hand down Asahi’s pants.

Asahi starts to say something else, but it dissolves into incoherency when Noya’s fingers brush against the head of his cock. “Wow Asahi, you’re huge!” Noya says. He’s not really surprised, since Asahi is huge all over, but he’s still impressed. Asahi just goes even redder and covers his face with his hands. “Hey, don’t be embarrassed, it’s cool! If I do it like this, is that okay?”

“Yeah, um, can you do it sort of—tighter—yeah, _ahh_ , like that—”

Asahi lasts a couple more minutes with Noya stroking him before he comes too, clutching at the sheets and clenching his jaw and looking generally mind-meltingly hot. They lie there for a few more minutes after that, catching their breath, both slightly stunned—or at least Noya is stunned, trying to figure out exactly how they went from talking about being homesick to frantically getting each other off. Then Asahi gets up to clean himself off, and Noya kicks his gross boxers off onto the floor, thinking _wow, holy shit, there’s no way I’m ever going to be able to sleep now_. He has vague plans to capitalize on this by initiating some cuddling, maybe making out again in a bit, but those plans never materialize, because he’s out cold before Asahi even makes it back to bed.


	4. Chapter 4

SAINT-TROPEZ, FRANCE, 2015

“Huh, it almost looks _worse_ ,” says Noya, touching one of Asahi’s forearms, both of which are still all red and bumpy. “Like you got even more bites. But I didn’t get any and I was right beside you all night! What gives?”

Asahi examines his arms too, frowning. The Riviera flashes by outside the window of their train car, dry, scraggly hills on one side and the ocean flashing a deep, dazzling blue on the other. “I don’t know. I didn’t notice getting bitten. Maybe they’re hives?”

“Oh, hives, great! What _else_ are you allergic to out here?”

“I don’t know!”

“Hey, maybe it’s all the fresh air. Your delicate skin needs that Tokyo smog…”

Asahi just rolls his eyes, and Noya grins at him happily, grabbing his hand and lacing their fingers together between their seats where no one can see, even though he doesn’t really think anyone here would care. He’d been kind of worried that Asahi might get weird after last night, overthinking things as usual, but he actually seems pretty normal. The only real change in their usual routine so far is that they woke up, had breakfast, packed up their stuff, and then almost missed their checkout time because they were busy heatedly making out against the kitchen counter, resulting in a mark pressed indelibly into Noya’s lower back and their host very nearly walking in on them with their hands up down each other’s pants.

“So what’s good in Saint-Tropez, Asahi?” Noya asks, as Asahi consults his guidebook. Maybe last night just left Noya extra-biased, but he thinks Asahi looks especially good today, with his nice hair sort of half-up and the short sleeves of his shirt tight against his shoulders.

Asahi brushes a bit of loose hair behind his ear as his eyes skim the page. “The usual, I think. The beaches, the old town, the market, some hiking trails. The—how do you say this?”

“ _Vieux Port_ ,” says Noya. A tiny knot of anxiety begins to twist itself up in his stomach. “Are you bored?”

“What? No, no!”

“You sure? ‘Cause you just said _the usual_ like—”

“I’m not bored!” Asahi insists.

“You can say if you are—”

“I’m not!”

“Okay,” says Noya, still deeply suspicious. Sometimes Asahi is just too nice of a guy. Since he has a lot of big squishy feelings, he’s very careful about how other people feel. Noya really likes that about him, but it also means he’s not convinced that Asahi would say anything even if he were having a totally awful time. But that’s okay. Noya will have to work extra hard to make sure he has fun in the last six days of their trip. He can totally do that. He’s good at having fun. He’s the _best_ at having fun. Case in point:

“Hey, wanna hear something gross?” Noya says when they’re wandering through the open-air market at Place des Lices a few hours later, looking at the mounds of fresh fruit piled in baskets in a vendor’s stall.

“Um, well, I don’t—” Asahi starts

But Noya is already pointing at the figs and saying, “I heard that wasps crawl inside figs to lay their eggs, and then they get stuck and die, and then the figs secrete this freaky enzyme that dissolves the wasp, so if you eat a fig you’re eating dissolved wasp too. Isn’t that gross?”

“Ew,” says Asahi. His expression suggests he’s currently revisiting every fig he’s ever eaten and experiencing a profound and visceral sense of regret.

“Right? Hey, we should buy a couple and see if we can find wasp bits that didn’t get dissolved all the way. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

“Um… no,” says Asahi.

They go to the Musée de l’Annonciade instead, which is terrible, appalling, even more boring than all the designer stores in Cannes, so _intolerably_ boring that it makes Noya want to lie down on the floor and just die so he doesn’t have to look at one more weird blurry landscape painting of a sailboat meandering pointlessly around a dinky little harbour. Asahi’s into all that artsy shit, so for his sake Noya makes his very best effort to pretend the Musée isn’t sucking his soul out through his eyeballs. Eventually, though, after they’ve been stuck wandering through the endless galleries for at least a million years, Noya finds he has no choice but to go right up to Asahi and slump dramatically against him, sending him staggering dangerously close to one of the statues on display and earning a couple of disapproving looks from nearby museum patrons.

“Ahh! What is it? Are you okay?” Asahi asks.

“No!” says Noya. He slumps harder, and Asahi grabs him in a panic, trying to set him upright again before one of them knocks the statue off its pedestal.

“Oh, oh my God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize, what’s, um, are you—”

“Asahi,” says Noya. He grips Asahi’s shirt and thumps his head against Asahi’s chest, eliciting a concerned _oof_ from Asahi as all the air is knocked out of him. “This museum is _so boring_. I’m _dying_.”

“Okay, you’re not dying,” says Asahi, rolling his eyes. “Stop clinging to me, people are staring—”

“It’s been _hours!_ I can’t do this anymore!”

“It’s been forty-five minutes,” says Asahi. “Let go, you’re going to push me over—”

“I’m not gonna make it, Asahi—”

“Okay, okay, fine, we can go!” says Asahi. “Just—oh no, now you’ve done it—”

The security guard approaching them from across the gallery does not look impressed. He glances disdainfully at Noya, then turns to Asahi and says, “ _Monsieur, prenez votre fils dehors, s’il vous plaît._ ”

“Hey!” says Noya. “I’m not his— _je ne pas vos—_ uh, that’s not right—fuck! I forget how to say it!”

“What, what did he say?” Asahi asks worriedly.

“He said your shirt would look even sexier if you undid a few buttons,” Noya tells him.

“He did _not_ say that,” says Asahi, but his hand goes to the top buttons on his shirt anyway, his fingers fiddling with them anxiously.

The security guard glares at them, uncomprehending but vengeful. He points towards the exit. Noya and Asahi take the hint and hurry out into the front courtyard

“Sorry I got us kicked out,” says Noya. He does genuinely feel bad, a little. He’d wanted to leave, but getting forcibly ejected was maybe overkill.

“It’s okay,” says Asahi. “You made it forty-five minutes. That’s pretty good for you. What did the security guard really say?”

“Ummmm,” says Noya, who does not think Asahi will be thrilled to hear that the security guard thought Asahi was Noya’s dad. “Oh, he just told us to quiet down. Y’know, I’m impressed you’re not freaking out about getting in trouble. You’ve chilled out a lot since high school.”

“Really? I don’t feel that chilled out,” Asahi admits. “But I guess it feels like things don’t count as much here.”

“Right. Totally, yeah,” says Noya, trying not to read too deeply into that. “See? I _said_ you needed a vacation! Hey, wanna get dinner? Places should be starting to open by the time we walk down to the port.”

SAINT-TROPEZ, FRANCE, 2015

“Do you talk to your grandfather much?” Asahi asks. The bedsprings groan mournfully as he shifts his weight.

“Yeah, I taught him how to text, so we message a lot,” says Noya. His mouth is watering a lot right now. Is that normal? He’s not sure that’s normal. “He’s getting kinda deaf so it’s hard talking to him on the phone, though.”

“What about your grandmother, is she…?”

“They split up, like, thirty years ago. She lives in Kyoto or somewhere with her boyfriend. I haven’t seen her in years.”

“Oh, well, it’s nice, um, that you’re so close with your grandfather, at least…”

Asahi is sitting on the edge of the bed. Noya, kneeling on the floor between his legs, rests his arms across Asahi’s knees and looks up at him, past his naked thighs, past the obvious bulge in his tight underwear, past his spectacular pecs. “Hey, Asahi?” Noya says.

“Yeah?”

“Can we maybe _not_ talk about my grandpa when I’m trying to go down on you?”

“Oh, right, yeah, sure, sorry…”

NICE, FRANCE, 2015

“ _It’s your sunscreen!_ ” Noya shouts, pointing an accusatory finger at the bottle Asahi is squeezing into his hand, and Asahi jumps in surprise, fumbling the bottle and spattering sunscreen all over the boardwalk along the Promenade des Anglais.

A few people passing by step away from Noya in alarm, looking almost as concerned as Asahi, who says frantically, “What, what? What’s wrong with my sunscreen?”

“It’s giving you hives! I’ll bet you anything!” says Noya. “‘Cause you put it on all over when we go to the beach, and you’ve got hives on your stomach too!” This they discovered last night, prompting an inconvenient fifteen-minute intermission mid-sex, just as things were starting to get interesting, so that Noya could Google _hives stomach symptom bad?_ while Asahi put his head under the pillow and freaked out a little.

“You’re right!” says Asahi, and Noya is mildly offended at how astonished he sounds. “Ahh! What am I supposed to do? I’ll burn if I don’t wear it…”

“You’re only here two more days anyway,” Noya points out, trying not to sound too glum about it. “Let’s just get you another brand. If that bugs you too, you can just visit Suga-san’s beautiful dermatologist.”

(Suga claims to be a patient of the most beautiful dermatologist in all of Japan, according to Asahi. “Suga video-calls me every time he goes to see her so I can help him pick an outfit,” says Asahi. “He spends the whole appointment with his shirt off, so I don’t know why, but…”

“Totally ridiculous, you’re right,” says Noya, already resolving to get a referral the second he gets back to Japan so he can behold the dermatologist’s beauty for himself.)

So they go back to the pharmacy, again. This is their fifth visit in two weeks. Their vacation has basically amounted to a tour of the Riviera and its pharmacies. First they picked up the offending sunscreen in Nice, then Asahi’s allergy pills in Èze, then condoms in Cannes, then different condoms in Saint-Tropez (because Asahi had gotten so flustered in the Cannes pharmacy he’d bought the wrong size), and now full circle, back to the good old Pharmacie Massèna in Nice, for different sunscreen that hopefully won’t leave Asahi looking like he has an intimate and loving relationship with five hundred very affectionate blackflies.

After the pharmacy they hike Mont Boron, then spend the rest of the afternoon lounging around the beach, stumbling over the stones to splash into the water whenever they get too hot. Unlike the rest of their trip, their second-last day contains no major incidents related to unseasonal rainfall, navigational problems, wild animals, heatstroke, escaped reptiles, unstable rocks, mysterious allergies, nude beaches, missed trains, irate museum attendants, too much wine, et cetera. It should be relaxing. Noya, who has spent the past year of his life perfecting his natural ability to Live In The Moment, should not feel steadily consumed by a sense of existential gloom that piles on a little more emotional weight every time he checks his phone and sees that another hour has passed.

The thing is. Well. See, the thing is that Asahi is a professional overthinker. He’s as good at overthinking as Noya is at underthinking. And right now there are a few self-evident questions that are presenting themselves to Noya, namely _hey, we’ve spent the past six days having a ton of sex, and now you’re going back to Japan, and I’m not, so like, what’s the situation here?_ Noya’s been dwelling on various iterations of this question with increasing frequency over the past few days, ever since the initial post-coital delirium of _holy shit he’s actually into me_ turned into the _post_ -post-coital panic of _holy shit I don’t know what the hell I’m doing_. If Noya’s a little concerned over this, then normally he would say Asahi has to be losing his goddamned mind over it. But Asahi hasn’t brought it up once, not _once_. It’s not exactly _worrying_ , no, Noya wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s _worrying_ , but it is— _unusual_.

And Noya has been dwelling on this in _particular_ ever since—not to put too fine a point on it—ever since Asahi made that comment about stuff not counting on vacation. So. There’s that.

When Asahi is in the shower later that afternoon, Noya finally cracks and calls Ryuu.

“Dude, it’s almost midnight,” Ryuu groans. “We were about to go to bed…”

“It’s an _emergency_ ,” hisses Noya, keeping his voice low to make sure Asahi can’t hear him over the noise of the shower. “Ryuu, I think I’m bad at sex.”

“ _What?_ No way! You’re good at everything!” Ryuu insists. “I bet you’re great at sex!”

“Not everything! Not math! Remember math? I sucked at math!”

“You sucked worse at social studies—”

“ _See?_ I suck at lots of stuff! And see—okay, the thing is, you know how me and Asahi have sort of been, like, hooking up?”

“Right, yeah, I think maybe you did mention that one or two or a hundred times,” says Ryuu. “So what’s up? Did he, like, give you a performance review? A little user experience feedback? ‘Cause there’s a learning curve for sure, man, I’m sure Asahi-san gets that—”

“It’s not that!”

“So what, is he getting weird about it?”

“No! He’s not saying anything about it! And he leaves tomorrow! Why hasn’t he said anything about it? It’s ‘cause I suck at sex, right? Or, I don’t know, is this a thing, hooking up with your friends on vacation? Is this like a casual thing? Is he just gonna go back to Japan and start dating another loser from Daichi-san’s program? Am I out of touch?”

“Uh, maybe?” says Ryuu, sounding uncertain. “Look, I got engaged to my first-ever girlfriend, so I gotta say, I’m not _super_ up-to-date on the casual hookup scene, but Asahi-san doesn’t _really_ seem like a casual hookup kinda guy either.”

“Huh?” says Noya. He would totally have a casual hookup with Asahi. He would totally have a _million_ casual hookups with Asahi. He would totally have casual hookups with Asahi every day for the rest of his life. Probably anyone would. Duh. “Why not? He’s so hot!”

“Yeah, but he’s, well, y’know, he’s _sensitive_. Like, d’you remember that time at inter-high in first year when Asahi-san had that new sweater and Suga said it made him look like a divorced dad trying to relate to his distant kids, and—”

“—oh yeah, and Asahi cried, and then Suga-san cried, and—”

“—and Daichi pretended he didn’t know either of them, yeah, that time. I just feel like the kind of guy who cries over Suga’s teasing—I mean, it’s _Suga_ , come on—doesn’t have the emotional resiliency for casual sex,” Ryuu concludes sagely, with all the wisdom of someone also three-hundred-percent emotionally unequipped for casual sex.

Noya chews on his lip. This is all true. Asahi’s almost as infamous for his handle-with-care-this-side-up glass heart as he is for his tendency to look like a sexy and homicidal yakuza boss whenever he frowns. But that just makes this whole situation even more confusing.

“Why don’t you just bring it up yourself?” Ryuu suggests.

“I don’t know, it’s just, like, I guess, y’know, it’s kind of…”

“Scary?” Ryuu guesses, unnervingly perceptive as usual. “Well, yeah. But you’re Nishinoya Yuu! When have you ever let that stop you? You got this, man!”

“Okay,” Noya says. He doesn’t feel like he’s got this. He has possibly never felt less like he’s got this. What Ryuu doesn’t seem to grasp is the fact that Asahi is so cool that standing beside him makes Noya’s brain turn into slush and dribble slowly out his ears, even now that they’re friends, even now that they’re casually (or maybe, hopefully, _un_ -casually) hooking up. But the universe doesn’t care, because the universe dictates that Asahi chooses that moment to turn off the shower, forcing Noya to add hurriedly, “Shit, I gotta go—”

“Put yourself out there! Bare your heart!”

“Okay, okay, I’ll bare my heart, now go to bed—”

“Everything okay? Was that Tanaka?” Asahi asks, toweling off his hair as he emerges from the bathroom, still damp, very naked, and devastatingly hot.

“Yeaaaaaaah,” Noya says, not even bothering to pretend not to stare. “Uh. Yeah. That was just. That was. We were. Hey, d’you remember that time at inter-high when you were wearing that sweater and Suga said—”

Asahi freezes and shoots Noya a look of deep betrayal. “ _That’s_ what you were talking about?”

“Uh, well, no, I mean, it sort of came up organically,” Noya says weakly. Oops. Alright, that was possibly not the best way to lead into a do-you-want-to-date-me-as-bad-as-I-want-to-date-you conversation, but maybe he can still do this. He takes a deep breath and forges bravely onward. “So anyway, I was kinda wondering—”

“It wasn’t about the _sweater_ ,” Asahi insists, still looking wounded. He hangs his towel over the back of a chair and pulls on a clean pair of underwear. Hmm. Noya has a feeling his chances of post-shower sex right now are probably not so good. “It was inter-high! We were stressed out! Suga cried too—”

Noya gives up. Well, no, he’s not giving up, he’s just waiting for a more opportune moment, like maybe when he hasn’t just poked Asahi in one of his many emotionally squishy spots. Instead, he just pats Asahi’s arm and says, “I know, big guy, I know.”

MIYAGI, JAPAN, 2013

“You’re _really_ not jealous of Tanaka-san, like for real?” Shouyou asks curiously at lunch. It’s a cold and rainy October afternoon, so they’re eating inside, sitting at Noya’s desk in his third-year classroom.

“Of course I am! He’s dating Kiyoko!” Noya says, gesturing so vigorously with his chopsticks that an unfortunate piece of mushroom goes flying and splats against the radiator. “Aren’t _you_ jealous? Isn’t _everyone?_ He’s dating _Kiyoko_. Kiyoko!”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” Shouyou acknowledges. “Not Kageyama, though. He doesn’t even like girls.”

“He doesn’t?” Noya says, suddenly interested.

Shouyou pops a piece of broccoli in his mouth and shakes his head. “Too obsessed with volleyball,” he explains, which is rich, coming from Shouyou. “A girl in our class confessed to him last week and he just stood there and stared at her until she left. What a dummy!”

“Oh yeah, right,” says Noya, his interest abruptly waning. “Anyway, Ryuu and I made a sacred pact in first year that Kiyoko’s word was law, and she likes him, so, y’know, that’s that. I mean, why wouldn’t she like him? He’s a great guy!”

Shouyou nods vigorously. “Yeah! He’s so cool! His cut-shot is so tight now! Hey, so is it weird for you, having him as our ace now?”

“Huh? Why, just ‘cause of Kiyoko? Dude, he’s my best friend—”

“No, no, ‘cause Asahi-san’s gone! Remember last year, you didn’t even want to play unless he came back to the team!”

“Oh, that,” Noya says glumly. Sure, he’s jealous of Ryuu, but with Kiyoko, at least Noya put himself out there. Asahi’s in Tokyo now and Noya never even worked up the guts to come right out and say _hey, I like you!_ It was scary, and he chickened out, and he’s furious at himself for it, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. “Yeah, I mean, I guess I’m over it.”

NICE, FRANCE, 2015

“Hey Asahi?” says Noya. He picks out an onion trailing from his pan bagnat and crunches down on it in what he hopes is a casual and relaxed way. His stomach feels all tight, twisted up into electric knots; it makes him want to do something stupid, but he’s doing his best to resist the urge. Asahi’s flight leaves in five hours. Noya has already procrastinated just about as long as he possibly can.

“Yeah?” says Asahi. He’s leaning on the old wall around the Bellanda Tower observation deck, sipping at his to-go cappuccino, staring absently out over the colourful buildings of Vieux Nice dollhouse-tiny below them and the sea beyond that. His hair is up again, the same way he always wore it in high school, but the wind is whipping bits out of his bun, frizzing it all up; he’s wearing one of his nice fitted t-shirts again, with his nice tight pants and his nice bag slung casually over one shoulder. He looks so good. He _always_ looks so good. He’s so unbelievably cool. Noya wonders what he’s thinking about, if he’s nervous about the flight, or stressed about making it to the airport, or sad to be leaving, or counting down the minutes until he can get back to Tokyo, visit Daichi in Miyagi, and select his next mediocre boyfriend from amongst Daichi’s undeserving classmates.

The best thing is probably just to come right out and say it. “What happens when you leave?” asks Noya.

Asahi tears himself away from the sprawling view and looks at Noya. “Well,” says Asahi, “usually, once you get to the airport you have to check in, and then they make you put your bags through security, and then—”

Noya punches Asahi in the stomach. “Wow, Asahi, Tokyo turned you into a real comedian, huh?”

“I guess so, um, I mean, you’re laughing, right?” says Asahi.

“I’m not—” Noya starts, which is as far as he gets before Asahi reaches over and pokes Noya in the ribs, right where Asahi knows he’s ticklish. Noya lets out an unattractive wheeze and shoves Asahi away, and Asahi shoves him back, and then—

—and then this is the point at which Noya absolutely, irreparably, catastrophically fucks up, fucks up _big-time_ , fucks up on a _cosmic scale_ , fucks up so bad that he can physically _feel_ at least ten generations of dead Nishinoyas cringe from beyond the grave and whisper in their sussurrant spooky ghost voices _oof, buddy_ , _you really goofed that one._

What Noya does is he shoves Asahi again, harder this time, because Asahi’s a big boy and can totally take it. He does not take into account the fact that Asahi is holding a cappuccino in a to-go cup with a loose lid that will slosh up over the side when Noya shoves him. He does not consider the fact that Asahi will instinctively lurch forward to rebalance the cup and preserve the structural integrity of the cappuccino. He never once thinks about the fact that, following the fucked-up laws of physics, Asahi’s bag will then slide down over his arm and drop right off the side of the observation deck as Asahi fumbles frantically and fruitlessly to catch it.

Bellanda Tower is ninety-two metres high, which means that Asahi and Noya both have plenty of time to lean out into the open air and watch Asahi’s backpack fall. The good news is that it does not land on and seriously concuss some hapless tourist down below. The bad news is that it lands in a palm tree overhanging the street, one strap snagged precariously on a frond, which sways in the sea breeze and bows worryingly under the weight of the bag.

“Shit,” Noya says numbly.

“My passport’s in there,” Asahi says, in the conversational tone of someone a fraction of a second from freaking out.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Noya elaborates.

Startled tourists press themselves against the side of the hill and stare curiously as Asahi and Noya tear down the stairs back to the city below, propelled by the potent renewable resource of blind panic, narrowly avoiding breaking their necks as they stumble over the uneven old steps. At the bottom of the hill, both gasping for breath and clutching at stitches in their sides, they round the final corner and stagger up to the tree holding Asahi’s bag hostage. This is when they encounter Problem #2.

“ _This is the biggest tree in the whole Riviera!”_ Noya hisses. It looked a whole lot smaller from way up on the observation deck. “What the fuck! Where did this thing come from? It’s, like, eighty feet tall!”

“Um, well, it’s, um, there’s, oh my God…” mumbles Asahi. His face has taken on an unsettling greyish cast under his golden Côte d’Azur tan.

Okay. Okay. Noya can fix this. He forces himself to take a deep breath. He’s been in worse situations before. Can he think of one right off the top of his head at this moment? No, but that’s irrelevant. He just needs to innovate.

“Um, what are you doing?” Asahi asks as Noya slips his own backpack off his shoulders and swings it around a few times to get a feel for its heft.

“I’m gonna throw my bag at your bag to knock your bag down,” Noya explains, winding up for the pitch.

“What? No! Don’t do that!” Asahi yelps, and grabs Noya an instant before the bag leaves his hand. “Noya! What if yours just gets stuck up there too? Your keys are in there!”

“Oh yeah,” says Noya. “Wait! I have a backup plan. Stay here, okay, I’ll be right back—”

He runs across the street and down the stairs to the beach, where he unzips his backpack and proceeds to cram it full of as many rocks as he fit. Then he runs back to Asahi, who eyes the bulging backpack warily but consents to crouch down so Noya can climb up on his shoulders, where he spends the next ten minutes throwing rocks as hard and high as he can while Asahi mutters, “Please stay still, please stay still, you’re going to fall, _Noya—_ ”

“Did you see that, Asahi, did you see, I grazed the bottom of it there, I’m pretty sure it shifted—”

Noya’s down to his last few rocks when he finally lands a solid hit, knocking the bag free of the palm frond, which boings back up to join its brethren. Noya lets out a whoop, almost pitching forward over Asahi’s head until Asahi steadies him, and Asahi puts him down so they can rush forward, just in time to witness Problem #3 enter their lives.

“You’re _kidding_ me,” Noya says in disbelief as they watch Asahi’s bag fall into the back of a truck, which whooshes past them on the road with a blare of its horn. 

It’s the kind of ridiculous stunt they would never have been able to engineer on purpose—the timing, the trajectory, the impact force, all these delicate variables that had to interact just so, serendipitously colliding into a one-in-a-trillion chance of making the predicament actually _worse_. Noya kind of wishes he’d had his phone out so he could film it. Ryuu would’ve lost his mind watching that. More importantly, however, Asahi is losing his mind right here, right now, both his hands clapped over his mouth as he stares after the truck in horror.

Noya, always good at thinking on his feet, is already racing after the truck, shouting, “Hey, stop, hold up, _arrêtez_ , _arrêtez,_ fuck, at least slow down, dude!”

But the truck—rusted-out, sagging, groaning every time it hits a bump in the pavement, better suited to the scrap heap than to the fanciest street in Nice—just wheezes along the road. The driver is either ignoring Noya or, perhaps more likely, can’t hear him over the gasping of the exhaust and the squawking of the twenty or thirty live chickens crated in the truck’s bed. The truck slows when it hits the traffic along the Promenade, enough that Noya and Asahi sprinting at top speed can just keep it in sight—they can just see Asahi’s backpack slung jauntily over one of the chicken crates, pecked at occasionally by a curious white chicken—they can just tell, definitively, that short of a major traffic accident, there is no way in hell they’ll ever be able to catch up.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” gasps Asahi, whose panic mode is apparently unaffected by the physical rigours of trying to chase down a moving truck on foot.

“It’s… okay!” Noya wheezes. And his next stroke of genius hits him with all the force of the leftover rocks in his backpack slamming into his spine with every step (he really wishes he’d had a chance to take those out). He glances around wildly, ignoring the alarmed pedestrians leaping out of their way as they tear down the sidewalk—come on, come on, he knows it’s around here somewhere—ah!—“Keep going, I’ll catch up!”

“Wait, where are you—” Asahi starts, but Noya has already veered off towards the boardwalk, slinging his backpack around the front of his body so he can dig through it for loose change as he runs for the bike racks.

The Promenade boardwalk has a row of those automated bike rentals, really old-school ones, with little terminals by each bike where you can put in five euros to unlock the bike for a couple of hours. Noya jams coins in the slot desperately, getting down to his last few five-cent coins before the mechanism finally unlocks with a grating _clunk_. He wrenches it out of its stand, throws a leg over the seat, and takes off after Asahi.

This bike isn’t like Shouyou’s bike, which is old but light and always oiled and properly maintained. Shouyou’s bike is vintage, second-hand, well-used. _This_ bike is downright prehistoric. It groans and crunches, trailing flakes of paint in the air that get whirled away by the wind, and it creaks ominously, but Noya manages to get up some speed once he’s spun the pedals a few times and cracked through that initial layer of rust coating the chain. He skids out onto the road and pedals furiously until he pulls up alongside Asahi on the sidewalk, the truck getting further and further ahead despite the best efforts of uncoordinated red lights and Nice’s mid-afternoon downtown traffic.

“Here!” Noya calls, hopping off the bike and thrusting the handles at Asahi. “You pedal, I’ll go on the back! Hope you still have those high school thunder thighs, big guy!”

“ _Thunder thighs?_ ”

“Asahi! Focus up!”

“Oh my God, this is a bad idea, this is such a bad idea—” Asahi mutters, but he grabs the handlebars and jumps on, pausing just long enough for Noya to scramble up on the rusted-out rack, which shifts ominously under his weight but holds. Noya throws his arms around Asahi’s waist and clings tight. It feels sort of romantic, if you edit out a couple of minor details like how they’re both super sweaty and are currently tearing through traffic in hot pursuit of a small-time chicken farmer as cars honk irritably all around them.

“There, he’s turning, Asahi, he’s turni— _holy shit_ , give a guy a little warning next time!” Noya yelps as Asahi whips the bike around the corner and nearly sends Noya flying.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” Asahi pants. “Are you, um, are you okay? Why didn’t you get two bikes?”

“ _Two_ bikes? You think I have that kind of money? _There_ , look, he’s at a red light, go go go—”

“Noya, you’re squeezing, I can’t breathe—”

“My bad—fuck, there he goes—what the hell, that red was like two seconds—”

Downtown blurs around them, cars zipping by on one side only to slam on their brakes at intersections, high-end storefronts and restaurant patios passing at a more sedate pace on the other side, Asahi’s hair whipping into Noya’s face the whole time. The old apartment buildings towering over them shift into low-rise condos and small houses—Noya can feel Asahi’s chest heaving under his hands as he struggles to keep up their speed—the truck pulls ahead at another traffic light, and then another, but then a city bus pulls out in front, slowing the lane down, and—

“Just a little further, I almost got it!” Noya shouts over the wind whipping into their faces. The truck is just a few feet ahead—he swats a hand towards it, almost brushing the nearest chicken crate—all he needs are a few more inches—

“What are you—” Asahi begins, but Noya is already standing up on the rack, gripping Asahi’s shoulders to stay balanced as he reaches out again—almost, _almost_ —the tips of his fingers touch the strap of Asahi’s back—

“Noya, um, there’s a pothole, Noya, _Noya_ —”

“Relax, it’s fine—”

 _Fine_ is, perhaps, an overly optimistic assessment of the situation. Noya grabs the strap of Asahi’s bag and tugs it free just as the bike’s front tire hits the pit in the pavement. Already positioned precariously, Noya finds the jolt is enough to ensure that he’s no longer connected to the bike in any meaningful capacity. He at least has the foresight to let go of Asahi’s shoulder as he’s thrown off onto the sidewalk so that he doesn’t bring Asahi down too. He hits the ground hard, making a couple of errant pedestrians leap back from him with shouts of alarm and leaving behind one flip-flop and what feels like a considerable amount of skin scraped off somewhere on the asphalt, but hell yeah, _he has the bag_.

At this point, Noya has the dubious pleasure of becoming the most popular guy on the street. The chicken farmer has finally noticed something amiss and slammed on his brakes—or _her_ brakes, Noya corrects dazedly, as he sees an angry middle-aged woman beefy enough to arm-wrestle Asahi slam the door and stalk towards him, swearing at him in French. The car behind them pulls over too, a fancy convertible driven by a dude in sunglasses who leans out and says, “ _Hé, ça va?_ ”

A couple of the alarmed pedestrians crowd around him as well, also demanding, “ _Ça va, ca va? Qu’est-ce qui se passés?_ ” Wow. He was sort of prepared to fall off the bike—he was _not_ prepared to have this many people speaking French at him at once. And then, of course, there’s also—

“Asahi!” shouts Noya, waving the backpack excitedly as Asahi pushes through the crowd to get to him, white-faced. The bike is abandoned on the sidewalk, its wheels still spinning forlornly. “Look, I got it!”

“Oh my God, are you okay? You really—oh wow, oh, you’re, um, you’re bleeding a lot, you’re really—oh my God, that was terrifying, that was so dangerous…”

“But I got the bag,” says Noya, grinning. Whoa. That was so cool. Like an action movie or something. The pain hasn’t really registered yet. _So_ cool.

The irate chicken farmer rounds on Asahi, who flinches away in alarm and says, “Um, um…”

“ _Qu’est-ce qui se passés?_ ” asks the rich dude from the convertible.

“Uh, well,” Noya begins, and then stops. His French is rudimentary at best. He has absolutely no idea how to say _I knocked my friend’s bag off the Bellanda Tower observation deck and into a stupid-tall palm tree and then when I threw a rock at it to get it unstuck it fell into the back of this chicken farmer’s truck so we chased her on this shitty rental bike halfway across the city and I wiped out grabbing it off her moving vehicle, do you by any chance have about a litre of Polysporin on you that I could borrow for a hot sec?_

Eventually, when Noya is able to demonstrate that he is not in need of immediate hospitalization, and when the angry chicken farmer has been convinced that Noya was _not_ actually trying to pull off the weirdest and most impractical chicken-napping heist of all time, the concerned bystanders dissipate. This leaves Noya and Asahi on their own to pick the biggest chunks of gravel out of Noya’s scrapes while they contemplate Problem #4, which is as follows:

“Hey,” says Noya, surveying the street, where his blood stains the sidewalk and a few stray chicken feathers are settling against the curb, where the ocean is nowhere in sight and the historical landmarks of Nice’s downtown have been replaced by tired laundromats and dusty convenience stores, “where the fuck are we?”

NICE, FRANCE, 2015

All in all, Noya has to conclude that the last day of their trip goes approximately zero percent according to plan—not that he’s much of a planner, but he had a few general ideas about ending things off on a high note, leaving a good impression, walking along the beach one last time, having some heartfelt goodbye sex, that sort of thing, and oddly enough none of those general ideas had included space to account for getting lost in the north end of the city after chasing a chicken farmer on a bike. See, _this_ is why he doesn’t bother with planning. Shit like this always comes up.

They do manage to make it back to their AirBnB eventually, although Asahi is trembling so badly after the bike incident that they have to sit on a bench in some random park for a while until he can walk without looking like he’s about to pass out at any second. But by the time they get back they’re already running late to get Asahi to the airport, so instead of heartfelt goodbye sex Asahi spends a few minutes frantically throwing the last of his stuff into his duffel bag while Noya rinses out the worst of his scrapes and slaps a few Band-Aids on. Then they have to sprint for the bus, which they just barely make, and which proceeds to spend fifteen minutes idling at a stop outside a mall while the driver gets a coffee, leaving Asahi to check his watch anxiously every ten seconds as his flight’s departure time ticks closer and closer. Finally they sprint into the airport, with just barely enough time to get Asahi checked in and through security if there aren’t big lines, and—

“What?” Asahi asks worriedly as Noya doubles over laughing. “What is it?”

“Your flight’s late,” says Noya, pointing at the Départs screen, where VOL RETARDÉ is flashing next to Asahi’s flight number. “Like an hour late. Dude, we could’ve _walked_ here and you still would’ve made it.”

“I don’t know, I’ve seen what happens when you decide to walk somewhere,” says Asahi, but his shoulders sag with relief, all the tension draining out of him. He presses a hand to his chest. “Wow. Um. That was, um, that was kind of stressful…”

 _Kind of stressful_ is Asahi for _I was literal seconds away from having a total nervous breakdown._ Not exactly the best way to end their trip, not when Noya’s spent so much of the past two weeks screwing things up already. Asahi’s probably never going to leave Japan ever again. That, or he’ll only ever leave with Daichi, who will make them each a laminated copy of their itinerary planned down to the minute that they can carry around as they read their guidebooks together and visit endless terrible museums, after which Daichi will introduce Asahi to a selection of his most handsome and eligible fellow sociology students, all of whom have nice boring career prospects and can take Asahi on nice boring trips to Nagoya where they will not drop his backpack ninety-two metres into the middle of traffic.

“Wanna get something to eat?” Noya asks, trying not to get too despondent. Asahi looks like he could probably do with a little blood sugar spike.

They sit at a table outside the airport, the heat of the day finally stripped out of the air as it cools in the early evening light. Asahi doesn’t say much, just sort of stares off unseeingly into the unscenic parking lot while Noya picks at his sandwich. Noya isn’t the one leaving—well, he _is_ leaving soon, but for Italy, not back home to Japan—but he’s still being steadily consumed by post-vacation gloom.

“Sorry if the trip sucked,” says Noya, and Asahi looks at him in surprise.

“It didn’t suck. I had a lot of fun,” says Asahi. “I’m really glad you invited me.”

“Dude, it’s cool, you don’t have to be polite.”

“I’m not,” Asahi insists. “I really mean it.”

“But—but everything went wrong!” Noya bursts out. “You were allergic to everything! I made you walk everywhere! We were lost half the time! You sat on a snake—like that’s not a sex joke, you sat on a _real live snake!_ And then I threw your backpack off a cliff!”

“Technically I was the one who dropped it,” says Asahi, grinning. “And, um, you know, Mimi was actually kind of sweet…”

“Wow, Asahi,” says Noya, staring at him in disbelief. “You’re even cooler than I thought!”

He feels a little better now. But Asahi is still leaving. That hasn’t changed. And even Noya is struggling to be optimistic about the success rate of _hey, I made you chase a chicken farmer through traffic and then got us so lost you almost missed your flight, how do you feel about a long-distance relationship?_ as a dating pitch. Maybe he should just leave things as they are. Maybe they can just stay vacation-hookup friends. Hmm. Noya would like to think he has too much self-respect to stoop to that, but he knows that when it comes to Asahi, he absolutely does not.

The thing is, this feels different than in high school. Back then, Noya was just too much of a baby to put himself out there. Now—well, the complicating factor now is that in high school, Noya really liked Asahi, but now, Noya really _really_ likes Asahi. He likes him in just about every way it’s possible to like a person. As a long-distance friend, as a casual hookup, as a fantasy boyfriend, as a vacation buddy, as a short-term ball python co-parent, as a cure-all for homesickness, as a former teammate with whom he can gossip about other former teammates, as a co-conspirator in the Great Cross-City Chicken Farmer Shake-Down of 2014, you name it. He likes him _too_ much. Having an unrequited crush back in high school was one thing, but if Noya fucks this up now, he’ll straight-up get his heart broken, splattered to bits like an overripe cantaloupe dropped from a great height. That really freaks him out.

Asahi glances at him, then looks away. Then he does it again a minute later, and again, until finally Noya says, “What?”

“Um,” says Asahi. He fidgets with the paper wrapper for his own half-finished sandwich, tearing the corner a little and then smoothing it out again. “Oh, well, nothing. Never mind.”

“Hey,” says Noya, suddenly worried that he has somehow managed to mess things up anyway, “you’ll let me come see you in Tokyo, right? Like, for real?”

“Yes! Yes. Um. Whenever you want,” says Asahi. “I’d really like that. Um…” He tugs at his hair, and adjusts his glasses, and bounces his leg. Noya watches him curiously. This is the kind of stuff Asahi used to do before games in high school, when he was too jittery with nerves to sit still. Maybe he’s nervous about the flight? Is he a nervous flyer? He never mentioned it before, but he’s nervous about basically everything else, so Noya wouldn’t be surprised.

“Do you—” Noya starts, while at the same time Asahi says, “Noya, I—”

“My bad, you first,” says Noya.

“No, no, um, go ahead, sorry—”

“No, seriously—”

“Okay. Um.” Asahi closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He presses his hands into the table, as if bracing himself. “I was just—I was wondering—um—I was just sort of wondering—um. Oh my God, I can’t do this,” he mutters. “Noya, are we dating?”

Noya stares at him and says, very intelligently, “Huh?”

“I just, we, you know, since we were, um, and I thought maybe, but I wasn’t sure—but, um, and you’re really cool, and I know you like to be spontaneous, um, so I got nervous, and Suga said maybe I should try being chill about it, but I’m not chill, I’m really not chill, I’m so bad at being chill, and I thought maybe, you know, if it was just casual, that’s fine, obviously, I mean not _fine_ , I mean it _is_ fine, but, but I just, um—”

Noya continues to stare at him as Asahi flushes steadily redder. He’s really glad he made Asahi go first, because what Noya had been about to say was less about navigating the nebulous romantic-platonic boundaries of their relationship and more about whether or not Asahi had any Ativan to take for the flight. “Wait, wait, is this like—are you asking because—because you actually _want_ to date?”

“Um. Well. Yes?” says Asahi.

“Hey, hold on, why’d you say it like a question—”

“I mean yes! Yes. Um. Yes. I’d like to do that. If it’s, um, an option.”

“Like… for real, you want to date me?” Noya pushes, still skeptical. “Not just ‘cause our trip gave you Stockholm syndrome?”

“ _No!_ I told you, I had fun,” Asahi insists. “It was really exciting. I mean, maybe too exciting for me sometimes. But, um, I really liked doing it with you.”

“You seriously want to date,” Noya says, squinting at him suspiciously, waiting for the catch. “Even though I don’t have a job and I’m not even in Japan that much and I—”

“I do,” Asahi says firmly. “That stuff doesn’t matter. I just like you. So maybe, um, maybe if you want we could… try it out, or…”

“Okay,” says Noya. It feels like falling off the bike all over again, like this time it’s his feelings scraped raw on the lumpy asphalt of emotional intimacy. It’s new and terrifying and overwhelming. He likes it. He is resisting the urge to race around the airport parking lot in circles, whooping incoherently, but only just. “Okay, yeah, cool.”

“Okay,” Asahi repeats. He tucks a stray bit of hair behind his ear and looks down, suddenly shy.

“Should we, like, shake hands or something?”

“Um…” says Asahi. They look at each other and both start giggling.

Later, when Asahi can’t put off going through security any longer without seriously jeopardizing his chances of actually making it on the plane, they hover around the security checkpoint, both reluctant to say goodbye for real. Asahi glances around, then bends over to kiss Noya; Noya strangle-hugs Asahi until Asahi wheezes, “Oof, Noya, you’re hurting—”

“Sorry,” says Noya. He doesn’t sniffle, except that maybe he sniffles a little, from the dust in the airport, that’s all. “Hey, we’ll do another trip, right? I was thinking Morocco. Or Egypt. Egypt would be cool.”

“Yeah, I’d like that,” says Asahi. “And you’ll, um, you’ll come see me in Japan…?”

“Yeah! I’ll be there for your birthday,” Noya promises on a whim. Yeah, as a general rule, he’s not that into planning ahead. But this plan, this plan he really likes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am of course eternally indebted to the cinematic masterpiece Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007) for inspiring the bike chase/chicken truck scene... god bless


End file.
